dwight towers

We've moved

2010-07-18T05:30:00.000-07:00

Blogger was lovely (well, free).

But we've moved to http//dwighttowers.wordpress.com

Cheers

The Generation Gap

2010-03-11T02:32:00.000-08:00

Went to the Bristol Old Vic last night and saw Tom Morris's "Juliet and her Romeo"

What's that line from Saint-Just, something about "Those who make revolution by halves only dig their own graves."

What the hell am I talking about?

I am talking about the production. The gimmick was that Romeo and Juliet - and Tybalt and Mercutio etc.- are all in old folk's homes. Instead of the inter-generational conflict being the middle-aged versus the young, it's the middle-aged versus the old.

But for that to work, surely R and J and T and M and t'others would have to be in their second childhood- you know, going all Lear-y. They'd have to be so soft in the head that their children would be seeking power of attorney etc etc. But then there would be the problem- how are they then supposed to do the long soliloquies and the word play and all the rest of it if they are gaga. And why would the Nurse and the Friar humour them?

I'm afraid "doing R and J as pensioners" is one of those ideas that you get- stunt casting and all- that seems great after a couple of beers, but when you wake up the following day realise should be left on the drawing board, UNLESS you are going to do a major revision and rewrite, which will offend the purists. Generally, you're not allowed to do mash-up on Shakespeare's words, Creative Commons 3.0 notwithstanding.

So, neither fish nor fowl, and not tragic in the least.

What's my learning? That I really really don't like Romeo and Juliet, mashed, minced or pureed. The Baz Luhrman movie is fine, but other than that, yecch..

Learning from Las Vagueness

2010-02-28T04:11:00.000-08:00

Have been reading and absorbing "The Evolving Self: Psychology for the Third Millennium"

Here's a couple of quotes-

Evolution has apparently provided us with an efficient mechanism to make us do what is good for us- the experience of pleasure. But to save effort (and evolution is always about saving effort, because entropy is so powerful and energy is so difficult to obtain), it did not provide a complementary mechanism for sensing a golden mean and avoiding excess. As Tiger (he Pursuit of Pleasure 1992) says, paraphrasing the historian Santayana, “Those who do not learn from prehistory are condemned to repeat its successes.” The brain wont' tell us when enough is enough.

This chimes with something someone put up on a powerpoint recently (who? where? when? it's all a blur. Possibly at the NWDA horrorshow), a George Bernard Shaw quote "The thing we learn from history is that noone learns from history"

So how do we get out of this mess?

The only way to avoid becoming dangerously dependent on pleasure is to use the mind. Only through conscious reflection can we determine how much of what seems good is actually good for us, and then adopt a discipline that makes it possible to stop at the threshold. This is precisely what religions have tried to do: provide cultural institutions for holding to the golden mean. For example, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, three of the oldest and most widespread faiths, all advocate very strongly the moderation of unchecked appetites. The seven deadly sins of Christianity warn against indulging in excessive pride, too many material possessions, inordinate sex, too much food and drink, anger, and laziness. Similarly, the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism state that (1) suffering is an essential part of existence, (2) the cause of suffering is desire for sensory pleasure, (3) release from suffering involves the elimination of desire, and (4) elimination of desire is achieved by following the Noble Eightfold Path- which in turn is a system of self-discipline whereby one learns to control the boundless cravings of the body. Religions, however, may no longer be able to impose the necessary limitations, so until credible new cultural instructions are discovered, each of us is left to find the golden mean that will prevent pleasure from taking over our lives.

Page 44-5 of the Evolving Self

Dancing with the guy with the scythe

2010-01-25T22:30:00.000-08:00

Have a bit of an earworm at the mo'- a song by Frank Turner called "Long Live the Queen", which tells the tale of a dying friend who wants to rage against the dying of the light. It's got Turner's customary lyrical gusto, compassion and - dare I say - joie de vivre.

It makes a nice pair with a song by the Hoodoo Gurus called "It's time to go" (I can't find the song, so have mis-remembered the title. Will resolve this once I can get to my copy of the album in question, currently buried under a pile of books and folders...)
[27/1.2010: It's called "Night must Fall"]

Outside most of Leonard Cohen, who does good songs about checking out?

Oh, and look, Frank Turner is in Manchester on Weds March 17...

The Sony also rises, the House Always Wins

2009-12-20T12:10:00.000-08:00

OK, I like to rage against the machine as much as the next middle-class-warrior. And ain't it great to see Simon Cowell get a "bloody nose" (I bet he's too busy counting his money to give a monkey's). And there's the plucky facebook campaigners angle, which seems to make journos think they are Hip and Cutting Edge 2.0.

But clock this from the body of the BBC story

Rage Against The Machine are signed to Epic Records, which is part of Sony BMG, the same label as McElderry.

Also on this subject:
The FT's Ludovic Hunter-Tilney (yes, they have a double-barrelled pop correspondent. Go figure) reckons we're "raging against the wrong machine."

belated and tedious return. More to follow

2009-11-04T07:30:00.001-08:00

Bloody hell,

three months since I posted anything. Busy. Doing what? Couldn't tell you.

Anyhow, Viz 190 popped through my slot a week or three back. A 30th birthday blow-out with Fat Slags, letters

"This morning on the Jeremy Kyle show, after giving one of the guests the bad news that their boyfriend had cheated on them, he said "This is the worst part of this job." And he kept a straight face! Fair play to the man."
Followed on page 11 by "Kyle Honoured with Cunt Status"- very very funny piece, but Kyle, he's laughing all the way to the bank.

Please leave my arse along pretty good, as is BNPea

Meddlesome Ratbag is approaching high art- just beautiful

Read and Loearn and Wonder and Look and Learn has an hilarious piece "Incredible Flying Machines".

Look, I am going to stop now. Viz. Is. Funny. Sits well alongside my London Review of Books subscription.

My goodness, has it been three months?!

2009-08-16T00:34:00.001-07:00

Seems so. Well, anyway, here I am, now 39.
Woke at 6am- uggh. Pottered, slept again. Cleared off a chunk of accumulated paper on the desk, and then walked my sick bike to "Bicycle Boutique". At the cash point around the corner bumped into a Permaculture guy and had a chat about writing an Alternative Action Plan and what should go in it etc. Bought an MEN and a Financial Times, before having a veggie burger breakfast at a non-greasy spoon. Brief chat with a couple of other people (Manchester is like that) before schlepping to the Friends Meeting House. Managed to book the main hall and an additional room for Saturday 10th October- more climate change stuff- and also a room for January 20th (for a Copenhagen 'what happened' meeting). Spoke to a guy I see around more and more, who recommended I get hold of a copy of "City of revolution: Restructuring Manchester." So, detoured to Waterstone's, and they had a copy. I also ordered "Guilty and Proud of it."
Bought more ink cartridges, shoes (they look ridiculous because me feet's so big), before bussing it home, via a paneer tikka kebab and the last twenty minutes of the original Taking of Pelham 123 (saw the remake on Sunday with my best mate). Then the gym- on the stepper with the FT- one of my favourite places.
Back here, some desultory work. Read some more Tom Hayden ("Reunion"- very good stuff indeed). Watched an episode of 'Outnumbered' and then did some more work/thinking about Call to Real Action etc.
A long and not-enormously productive ay, but there you are...

Viz 185

2009-05-11T10:45:00.001-07:00

God I love Viz. It's one of my guilty pleasures. It will ALWAYS deliver at least one - usually many more - outright belly-laugh.

This issue has Baxter Basics MP fiddling his expenses, and getting his grandmother to save his bacon.

PC Hubble and PC Bubble "they're spoiling for trouble" (I do miss PC Hopper, bent copper!)

Drunken Bakers are as Beckettian as ever.

Jack Black and the Goodwin Manor Mystery is comedy genius "It's gettign a little chilly in here isn't it? Jack, put anotehr wodge of notes on the fire, would you, there's a chap... No, not the tens, the twenties give out more warmth?"

The Modern Parents delivers the sharpest and nastiest laughs, as usual. John Fardell skewers, as usual, eco-hypocrisies.

And Roger's Profanisaurus, well, What Can You Say?

"you can only fuck with the cock you've got"- exclam. Useful get-out clause for men defending themselves against accusations of inadequacy

"jizzabyte"- A unit of computer memory equivalent to approximately 1 million million gigabytes. 1 jizzabyte is defined as the approximate amount of hard drive space occupied by the pornography downloaded by an average teenage youth in a single calendar month.

"face like a rent boy's ringpiece" descriptive of someone who looks life has given them a regular, relentless and vigorous shafting.

A conspiracy against the public

2009-04-26T04:51:00.000-07:00

"All professions are conspiracies against the laity."--George Bernard Shaw.

Here's two quotes from slightly different places, that are worth thinking about in connection with each other and the broader goal of helping our institutions respond with the necessary speed and agility to the unfolding catastrophe of human-induced climate change...

"Increasingly, government agencies and other organizations are seeking to apply more participatory approaches to environmental decision-making as part of a wider institutional change towards more inclusive decision-maing. For example, in the UK, policy consultations now often involve stakeholder workshops, and these increasingly take place in the regions rather than just in the capital city. However, there is a danger of growing disillusionment among policy-makers and practitioners who have been involved in such processes that participatory processes are used to reinforce decisions already made, and so fail to realize many of the benefits that have been claimed for particiption. Our study illustrates that there are benefits to genuine participatory processes, and informs the development of best practices for engaging stakeholders in effectively designed participatory processes. In this light, institutionalizing participatory governance takes some power away from central decision-makers and gives it back to stakeholders. Though this may be perceived as risky, it has the potential to give rise to more effective as well as more inclusive decision-making." (1)

[Translation: "at the moment 'consultation' is a rubber-stamp exercise, where you can tick a box that says "I agree" or "I agree even more", but it doesn't have to be like that."]

And the other quote:

"In the deskilling logic, equipment design is left to the technical experts. There is little to be gained by involving technically untrained users in the design process, and such involvement risks politicizing the process. This is the more traditional approach. Salzman (1992) reviewed over 100 U.S. books on equipment design and 100 textbooks used in U.S. engineering design courses and found not one discussion of the possible advantages of user involvement in designing systems. If, however, the rationale underlying design is usability, the design process will be managed very differently."
[emphasis added] (2)

[translation: just like above; "we're the experts and you'll take what you're given."]

This is the dilemma for those who would rage intelligently and effectively against the machine: just how DO you get past the defensiveness of bureaucrats, and teach the elephant to tap-dance?

See also
The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security by Grant T. Hammond

Footnotes
(1) Foxon, Reed and Singer "Governing Long-Term Social-Ecological Change: What Can the Adaptive Management and Transition Management Approaches Learn from Each Other?"
Environmental Policy and Governance 19 3-20

(2)Adler, Paul "Two types of bureaucracy: enabling and coercive"Administrative Science Quarterly March 1996

You've been framed

2009-03-29T10:10:00.000-07:00

You saw it in the later part of last week - the Met getting its ideological retaliation in first, trying to shape the 'information battlespace' by worrying publicly about violence at the Put People First March. (And here's the other Met worrying about climate change).

And then there was the ritualistic distancing by various trades unions types. The fringe benefit for our apolitical friends in blue is that time spent proclaiming your innocence is time you can't spend getting the (metaphorical) boot stuck into the Enemy (blue-eyed bankers, finance capital, the System, greed, Capitalism - choose your abstraction).

That's what they teach you on the first day of Perception Management 101, I assume.

But anyway, two other examples of 'framing' recently - an "obvious" one from the front page of the Financial Times for March 10, about Youtube pulling official music videos from its site:

“I don’t think anyone is going to be happy about this, but there’s general understanding that we all need to work under terms that are reasonable for our businesses and we’re hoping we’ll come to a quick resolution,” Patrick Walker, YouTube’s director of video partnerships in Europe, told the Financial Times.
In a blog note, Mr Walker said the costs would be prohibitive, with YouTube losing significant amounts of money on every playback under the proposed PRS terms.
He said there was also a lack of transparency – PRS was unwilling to tell YouTube what songs were included in the licence so it could identify works on the service.
PRS for Music is a collecting agency that issues “mechanical” and performing licences for music to be used online, or performed or broadcast.
Steve Porter, chief executive of PRS for Music, said the organisation was “shocked and disappointed” at the last-minute notice of YouTube’s “drastic action”. “We believe [this] only punishes British consumers and the songwriters whose interests we protect and represent.”

Both sides trying to make the other guy the bad guy, obviously enough.

But then, if you really want a master-class in this stuff, get your eyes around this from the latest Private Eye. If it stands up (and Private Eye stories often do), it's delicious...

Wanton Destruction

2009-03-28T09:07:00.000-07:00

Take the unhappy heroin addict: he gives himself an injection because he desires the drug, but he also has a desire to be rid of this desire. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt has given such "second-order" desires a central role in his analysis of free will: we act freely, he submits, when we act on a desire that we actually desire to have, one that we endorse as our own. Beings that do not reflect on the desirability of their desires- like animals and, perhaps, our short-run selves - are what Frankfurt calls "wantons."

Holt, Jim (2007) The nannyish state, Prospect March 07

Who will teach me what I must shun? Or must I go where the impulse drives? —Goethe

I can resist anything, but temptation - Lady Windermere's Fan Oscar Wilde.

A crazier notion than that we are more than the sum of our spasms is not allowed much airplay, unless cloaked in some variety of theistic mumbo-jumbo.

See also:
False Consciousness
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (no, not read it yet)

Local government, newspapers and all that

2009-03-28T08:36:00.000-07:00

I haven't bought (or read) a Saturday Grauniad for a very long time.

Did so today out of curiosity over its G20 coverage.

I won't buy (or read) a Saturday Grauniad for a very long time. Or a weak day one, either.

But the interview with David "The Wire" Simon is worth a look-see.

Arrogant? Moi?

The collapse of the US newspaper industry has left politicians free to pursue their unethical schemes unscrutinised. "The internet does froth and commentary very well, but you don't meet many internet reporters down at the courthouse," he says. "Oh to be a state or local official in America over the next 10 to 15 years, before somebody figures out the business model. To gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city as a local politician! It's got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption."

Reading on the Stepper- 26th March

2009-03-26T16:04:00.000-07:00

You can plough through a lot in 97 minutes!

Great piece by Diane L. Coutu in the Harvard Business Review entitled "How Resilience Works."
Makes me want to go and read Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" right now.

And this is good- a quote from Karl E. Weick, a prof of organisational behaviour at the University of Michigan Business School. in Ann Arbor "There is good evidence that when people are put under pressure, they regress to their most habituated ways of responding.... What we do not expect under life-threatening pressure is creativity."

Excellent piece by Eli Kintishc of Science Magazine
"Projections of Climate Change Go from Bad to Worse, Scientists Report"
Yup, we're toast.

Heartening, if you want to delude yourself, is
"Vision 2050: A Sustainable future for Cheshire West and Chester"

Personally, when I imagine the future of mankind (sic) I imagine a carbon footprint, stamping on a human face, forever...

I also read Crain's Manchester Business.
All good stuff, with an especially amusing piece on the massive impending bunfith between Peel and Manchester city Council "Saviour's Gateway or Trojan horse?"

And Monday's FT, of which the stand-out piece, amid stiff competition, is "MBA arrogance and the myth of leadership" by Philip Delves Broughton.

And I even worked up a proper sweat for a change....

snow-capping

2009-03-23T23:44:00.000-07:00

This is the rather clever term that gets used to describe organisations where there are few white people at the top, above a whole lotta "non-white" (sic) people who are, you know, doing the work.

I like it, personally (the term, not the phenomenon!).

"CW: I think it’s a real danger of taking a superficial approach to diversity. We’ve heard about – in diversity terms – the whole thing about ‘snow capping’ which is the way they describe having a very diverse workforce but a completely white management board. Now we just don’t want to be that way. That’s not getting the best out of the resources you have. What we’ve set ourselves as a target is that the total representation of minority groups be absolutely equal and equivalent across all of our grading structure. Only then can we say that all of our policies and processes are fair."

CIPD podcat

Ponzimonium!

2009-03-22T09:23:00.000-07:00

"Some thought his returns might have been based on front-running- using the information from his brokering business to benefit his asset management clients. Sophisticated confidence tricksters have used a similar tactic for thousands of years. The fraudster hints at impropriety, but implies that the target will be the beneficiary rather than the victim. The suggestion... has two advantages. It provides a possible explanation of the source of the promised gains. And it encourages the victims to keep quiet until- perhaps even after- the deception is exposed."

How the “Madoff twist” entices the financially astute John Kay, FT March 18th

The FT has, understandably, been considerably exercised by the Bernie Madoff thing. Many of their heavy hitters (I liked what Alex Callinicos's description of Martin Wolf as 'primary intellectual ornament')

And this weekend's FT has a lovely new neologism (that's a deliberate redundancy, btw)

"US watchdog warms markets of 'rampant Ponzimonium'.

"Ponzimonium." Priceless.

See also:
A rather good book called "Pandemonium: the rise of predatory locales in the Postwar world."

It makes my brain ache

2009-03-22T08:06:00.000-07:00

Reading my FT magazine on the stepper at t'gym, I finally looked at (having probably seen many times) a full page advert for "Neurozan" capsules." These wonderful products are sold by "Vitabiotics", "supporting the brain's neuro-chemistry through optimum micro-nutrition."

And of course, it's like motherhood and apple-pie- it's very hard to argue AGAINST eating a broad balanced diet with plenty of fresh fruit and veg. And why would you? But that's not quite what they're saying. They're saying these pills will "keep you at your razor sharp best." They're appealing to the classic middle-class/knowledge workers fear of losing their Edge.
The worried well is a nice market, especially in a credit crunch.

We get angry when states and corporations dress up their plans (GM, Nuclear) as value-free/hard "science", but we seem to give gentler/individual focussed 'solutions' a free pass.

So I googled, and sure enough, there's a de-bunking website "Holfordwatch" I advise you have a good read of before you go buying any of these capusles, which are available on the high street..

See also:
Ben Goldacre's astonishingly good Bad Science
a book by Kimberly Lau called New Age Capitalism
this about Matey Capitalism and the Appliance of Science

Rape and the Media

2009-03-15T03:24:00.000-07:00

This is difficult. Any criticism of the newspapers' reporting of the scumbag rapist cabbie runs the risk of seeming like a plea mitigation of him, or ignoring/minimising the horrific damage he has caused dozens/hundreds of women (and their friends and families). So just for the record: if the evil little prick ever sees the light of day, it'll be too soon.

And yet, and yet...

This hand-wringing in the papers, several of which use women's (semi-naked) bodies as a marketing device allows us to think that the Monster is Out There. It's a variation on the “rapist is the freak in the hockey mask” myth. The rapist is the friendly neighbour, the ex-boyfriend, the partner. But we don't like to admit this.

Again, to be clear- contra the 70s radical feminist slogan not all men are rapists, but all men “benefit” from the prevalance of rape, insofar as it has a chilling effect on women's hopes and independence. (Of course, the husbands, fathers, sons and friends of a victim are affected by a rape).

Alongside this, how much coverage did the papers give to the actual substance of the criticism of Jacqui Smith and her mooted register of violent partners. Now there was a real story, a real campaign to be had. But there's less projection, less catharsis, and more awkward questions about funding choices, causes of the problem. Easier to find a real monster and give it acres of (cheap) and presumably salacious coverage (I've not read it).

Sigh.

Postscript, 28th March: One paper actually chose to cover this story as its front page lead- "Women dismiss new 'gimmicks' to tackle abuse". The paper? The Morning Star, March 10th.

Myths about rape.
FACT In 60% of the rapes reported to the Orange County Rape Crisis Center in 1991, the rapist was known to the victim. 7% of the assailants were family members of the victim. These statistics reflect only reported rapes. Assaults by assailants the victim knows are often not reported so the statistics do not reflect the actual numbers of acquaintance rapes.

FACT Over 50% of reported rapes occur in the home. 80% of sexual assaults reported by college age women and adult women were perpetrated by close friends or family members. There is no common profile of a rapist. Rapes are committed by people from all economic levels, all races, all occupations. A rapist can be your doctor, your boss, your clergyman, your superintendent, your partner, your lover, your friend or your date.

Restaurant review: Kroma

2009-03-15T03:20:00.000-07:00

Last time I went to Kroma in central Manchester was at least a year ago. It was a Saturday night, and thus rammed, but we did get seated and fed in a reasonable time. I remember the experience positively enough that when wifey suggested a repeat visit, I wasn't averse.

And the verdict? The food was seriously delicious (the roast vegetable pizza that tother half had was slightly more fantastic than the cheesy thing I had). The decor's great, the price is right (a starter each, a main each, a beer and a glass of wine, a shared desert and a decent tip came to just under £40), the staff were friendly.

My only complaint- when an ordered glass of white wine didn't show up, the waiter apologised profusely for the oversight and made it complimentary, spoiling the chance to have something negative to write. Honestly, the gall of the place...

Film Review: The International

2009-03-15T03:07:00.000-07:00

Some muppet on Radio 4 called this “a Bourne movie without Matt Damon.” Yeah, right. It's a Bourne movie with out MD, without a director one tenth as good as Paul Greengrass, or writers like Tony Gilroy and George Nolfi, stunt directors like Dan Bradley.

This movie is an atrocity.

With the partial exception of a couple of good lines of dialogue e.g. “You should relax.”“I feel more comfortable when I'm tense”, this movie has NO redeeming qualities. Not even the much vaunted shoot-out at the Guggenheim is any good. It's trying to mimic the 'public place meets the brutal realities of international espionage' that Greengrass pulled off for Alexanderplatz in the Bourne Supremacy and Waterloo Station in Ultimatum. But it fails fails fails. It's too long, too comic book, just plain irritating.

It's not that Owen is bad, it's just that he's given nothing proper to work with. It's not that Watts is bad, it's just that her character wasn't needed in this film.

There are big fat didactic wodges of shoe-horned 'dialogue'- I thought Mike Meyers had killed this off with the Basil Exposition character in the Austin Powers films.

And that's the key. If you care about the characters you'll overlook violence to geography (e.g. Istanbul here) and you'll forgive some plot holes for the Bourne films, a short list would include; why didn't Landy figure Bourne was heading for Berlin after the Munich explosion, why didn't Noah Vosen disable Nicky Parsons computer after Madrid, what happened to the Tangier cops who were chasing Bourne, and how did he and Nicky so easily escape detection after killing Desh, what happened to Pam Landy's sidekick when he dropped her at 415/71).

But this, this... you DON'T CARE about the characters and also the plot holes are gargantuan; why does the Italian politician meet some low level flunkies and spill his guts? Where are the New York cops in the ten minutes or so once shots are fired at a major tourist attraction, why do other New York cops let Watts have Owen, how does Owen get to Italy, to Istanbul etc etc etc. I could go on. But neither you nor I want me to.

Do Not See This Film. Do not see any other film by the writer (Eric Singer) or the director (Tom Twyker)- they are on my Ron Howard list of film-makers to avoid.

More about the Law of Two Feet

2009-03-07T00:26:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone/both

[Ed: you've used this gag]

I found a good image of the flipchart explanation of the law of two feet.

And here's some text:
"The Law of Two Feet — a foot of passion and a foot of responsibility — expresses the core idea of taking responsibility for what you love. In practical terms, the law says that if you’re neither contributing nor getting value where you are, use your two feet (or available form of mobility) and go somewhere where you can. It is also a reminder to stand up for your passion."

And here's some more text:

We are all often in meetings or discussion groups where one member tries to dominate the discussion and effectively wrecks any possibility of an open conversation or the full participation by all the members of the group. Typically, some members sit in silence waiting for the session to end while others get into a heated argument with the protagonist. But there is a third way. Here is the law:

Sometimes it happens that overly zealous participants feel that their ideas are so important or powerful that everybody in a particular group (or even in the whole conference) should pay attention and listen. This one has to be nipped in the bud -- carefully. The way out is not to directly challenge the person, but rather to remind the assembled group of the Law of Two Feet. If everybody truly wants to listen, they should do that. But if that is not their desire, they have two feet which they should use. There is no need to argue and shout, just thank the group and leave. Egomaniacs quickly get the picture when everybody leaves.

The upside of patriarchy and war

2009-03-04T22:58:00.000-08:00

Needlessly and childishly provocative title aside, have a read of bits of these two letters that appeared in the FT earlier this year.

"When I joined the Australian Commonwealth Public Service in the 1970s, those in the senior positions (invariably male) had often started their working life during the Great Depression before serving in the second world war. Upon demobilisation they had patiently worked in a seniority-based promotion system for a modest salary in return for security of tenure and a superannuation scheme. By the time I left the service in the mid 1980s they were to be replaced by an increasingly university-educated mobile meritocracy on short and long-term contracts willing and able to transfer in and out of private enterprise. Since then many of the traditional areas of government service delivery (in Australia at least) appear to be constituted by web pages advertising mission statements and core values supported by call centres. Service is no longer a personal virtue but a commodity to be delivered."
Paul Stockley, Jan 31

"Pre-1974 there was an overall 17 percent quota limit on female medical students across the UK. The male-dominated profession was led by men who had been the backbone of military medicine during the second world war. We, their trainees accepted and enjoyed the challenge of long hours and the camaraderie of hospital mess life. Central to the "can do" philosophy was the continuity of care for every patient by a designated consultant team from admission to discharge. Society rewarded and respected this arduous work rate....
"What do we now face? The consequences are clear. Whereas my generation achieved consultant status after approximately 30,000 hours of broad and intensive training, the plan from April 2009 indicates that 6,000 hours is acceptable. imagine the outcry if airlines cut pilot training to 20 per cent of what was previously considered acceptable."
David Skidmore, Jan 5

There is of course the risk of rose-tinted spectacles. If things were that good, why did we need the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism etc. But in important ways, I think Stockley and Skidmore point to what has been lost (or stolen) along the way.

an ethic of social solidarity/noblesse oblige
an understanding that quality take time, diligence and patience and that the current "corporate culture"(sic) of karoshi and turbo-Taylorism has (steadily more visible) consequences

So, what is to be done?

The FT, the world soul and all that

2009-03-04T13:52:00.000-08:00

On the back of the Life and Arts section in the weekend FT, they have the same three columns. Presumably, when bored plutocrats get restless on a Sunday afternoon, have done screwing the mistresses after a week of screwing the proles/taxpayers, they can get a little aspirational consumerism and aspirational anti-consumerism. A bit of hormesis does you good..

Those three columns-
a) "The Fast Lane" by some guy called Tyler Brule, who spends most of his life in airport departure lounges or five star restaurants, and who spends ages comparing Singapore Airport to Swiss chalets etc. Every bit as edifying as it sounds. Reminds me of the John Hurt character in "Contact"- dying and eking it out by never touching down.

b) "How to Give It", where in a different worthy answers the same questions "which is the first charity you can remember supporting?" "is it more important to give time or money?" and so forth. It throws up the occasional interesting idea, and if gets the noblesse oblige juices of a junior alien overlord going, then well, that defers the revolution by a nanosecond more.

c) [the point of this post] "The Slow Lane" by Harry Eyres, where you'll get paens and threnodies and elegies for this or that. Eyres covers all sorts of 'dissidents'. Frexample, he did a good piece on Ivan Illich recently. Of course, you can dismiss all this as feelgood flannel, and say that Eyres is only published to make readers feel good about themselves and their paper, before returning to the real work of screwing the proletariat and sending a death threat to every insect the following day. That's as maybe, but the stuff is still worth reading.

Here is an example from the January 3/4 issue

"The writer I find most illuminating on all this is the maverick American psychologist James Hillman. Hillman draws attention not just to the individual human soul, the locus of salvation or damnation for Christians, but to the world soul, anima mundi. According to Hillman, psychotherapies will never work unless they "take into account the sickness of the world... you have to see that buildings are anorexic, that language is schizogenic, that normalcy is manic and medicine and business is manic".
John Keats said that the world was the vale of soul-making. Now we need to reverse that saying. To restore our own souls we need to stop destroying the world's soul, which includes the habitats, eco-systems and species under the kind of threat that neither Keats nor Freud ever envisaged."

Possibly related to:
Don Delillo's World Hum
Leonard Cohen's Blizzard

"It literally changed my life"- what changed yours?

2009-03-04T12:42:00.000-08:00

Hello all,

(or- given my viewing stats- "both"),

Two separate interviews, both in the only newspaper bar the Morning Star worth reading (yes, He's Banging On AGAIN about the Bloody Financial Times and how All Anti-capitalists Must Read It) have got me wanting to pose the question: what reading material has "literally" changed your life?

For me, I'd say Chomsky's World Orders, Old and New. I'd been softened up by a whole lot of other, liberal, stuff, but had only read a couple of short Chomsky pieces before.

What say all/both of you?

Those two quotes-

Rosie Blau writing in the Life and Arts supplement (which is a both bloody fantastic and a hot-bed of com-symps) on November 29th/30th last year entitled "Drawn from Memory"

"He was seven when he first encountered Mad, a monthly satirical magazine, and was immediately captivated by the drawings: "It literally changed my life." Unhappy at the thought of wasting money on comics, Vladek Spiegelman took to brinign home second-hand comic anthologies instead, inadvertaently introducing his son to titles banned from newsstands for their violent content."

and Ludovic Hunter-Tilney on Lou Reed "Why do I have to go through this?" June 21 2008

"Reed grew up in a middle-class Jewish household in suburban Long Island and attended Syracuse University. He identifies a short story by one of his tutors, the poet Delmore Schwartz, as a turning-point in his own development as a writeer. "'In Dreams Begin Responsibilities'", Reed says, "changed my life entirely and shaped the way I write, and everything along with it." It taught him the virtue of simplicity. "I don't think there's a single polysyllabic word there. The world shook for me when I read it."

Meetings is murder

2009-03-03T23:37:00.000-08:00

"But this new energy is being channelled by organisers into boring meetings which reproduce the hierarchy of mass society. After a while, critical thinking is eroded and people lose their curiosity. Meetings become a routine like everything else in life.

A lot of problems which collectives will have can be traced to the work habits acquired in the (mass) movement. People perpetuate the passive roles they have become accustomed to in large meetings. The emphasis on mass participation means that all you have to do is show up. Rarely, do people prepare themselves for a meeting, nor do they feel the need to. Often this situation does not become evident precisely because the few people who do work (those who run the meeting) create the illusion of group achievement.

Because people see themselves essentially as objects and not as subjects, political activity is defined as an event outside them and in the future. No one sees themselves making the revolution and, therefore, they don't understand how it will be accomplished."

From "Anti-Mass Methods of organisation for collectives"

Sigh. We will only ever "learn" when the ego-needs of the organisers, the prattlers they invite to speak and the half-in-love-with-spectating "participants" are no longer being met.

On the other side of the fucking apocalypse.

Training versus learning

2009-03-02T23:44:00.000-08:00

"So, how do knowledge workers learn? At best, they find things out for themselves, learn from each other and share acquired knowledge with their colleagues. All this underpins a major shift of the past decade: the emphasis has moved from training to learning. Training can be defined as "an instructor-led content-based intervention leading to desired changes in behaviour " and learning as "a self-directed work-based process, leading to increased adaptive capacity". Training and learning are related but conceptually different activities. Only learners can sit in the training room or in front of a screen but they cannot be made to learn. Therefore an effective strategy to promote learning must consider management, motivation and preparedness."

Martin Sloman, guest column in the FT 12 November 2008

This hits the nail on the head, IMHO.

And "training" is easy to deliver. Any numpty can (and all too often does) do it. Powerpoint, chalk and talk, collect your attendance certificates on the way out.

But creating the conditions for learning is a) more work b) much more likely to expose gaps in your knowledge.

So, you don't even go there. And everyone gets trained, but very few people learn.

It was ever thus?

See also: Paulo Freire and Ira Schor stuff, the whole hermeneutics thing, intelligence versus creativity etc etc.

Journalistic decline

2009-03-01T10:45:00.001-08:00

"We old-fashioned types expect industrialists to understand how their machines work; we expect chief constables to know what it's like to arrest a miscreant on the street; we believe journalists are enormously improved by knowing the hell that breaks loose when you mis-spell the name of the winner of the dahlia class at the flower show."

Matthew Engel "Sorry tale from four men in denial" Financial Times, Feb 11 2009

Yup. My dad (who met my mum when they were both young journos on a local paper) has this as one of his bug-bears. If you got someone's name or age wrong on a local paper, your editor called you- because he'd heard from the person, and you got a bollocking. You learnt quickly not to get the fine details wrong again. That was the old-fashioned 'apprentice' system.

Now you've got "journalists" being produced by universities, then going to work for nationals. And there isn't that nitty-gritty feedback. And so you don't learn the ropes.

Oh, it's all falling apart, end of western civ etc...

Three white men

2009-02-28T13:07:00.000-08:00

A few weeks back I went to the "Congress of the non-right" (I've disguised the name, to protect the innocent) here in sunny Manchester.

I had a really really fantastic time. Everyone kept their contributions short and to the point. No-one drivelled out-dated socialist rhetoric, and every workshop was structured around what small groups could brainstorm and then bring to a larger group, rather than what a Speaker Thought and Old White Men Thought in response...

What are you, fucking insane?

It was terrible, eye-stabbingly unbearable.
And I made a terrible spoof of a nursery rhyme to go with it.

Three blind mice	Three white men
Three blind mice, three blind mice,	Three white men, three white men
See how they run, see how they run,	See how they drone, see how they drone
They all ran after the farmer's wife,	They all ran over the given time
Who cut off their tails with a carving knife,	And cut off our verve with a lengthy whine
Did you ever see such a thing in your life,	Did you ever see such a pointless crime?
As three blind mice?	As three white men?

Who's Next?, as Tom Lehrer sang

2009-02-28T08:58:00.000-08:00

OK, so the name should have been a give-away, but I am slightly obtuse. Gideon Rachman, one of the most worthwhile reads in the FT (which is going some) is, almost certainly, of the Hebraic persuasion, as the ol' anti-Semite code used to have it. Not that that changes anything, just explains why he writes so much (and well) about the Middle East I guess.

His recent (24 Feb) piece "Nuclear Iran? Decision time is here" deserves closer attention than I am about to give it.

Ephraim Kam, of the Jaffe Centre for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, is fairly typical in arguing that a combination of Israeli and US nuclear deterrence would mean that "Iran will not use nuclear weapons, not against us and not against any other country."

Quite. Whatever happened to deterrence? Do we really think the Iranians are suicidal?

An Iran with nuclear weapons could destabilise the region in numerous ways. It could back radical Islamist movements such as Hizbollah and Hamas with more energy and less fear of reprisals. It could threaten and intimdate the oil states of the Gulf. It could frighten more of the educated and mobile Israeli middle class into emigrating. And it could precipitate a destabilising arms race across the region- as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Gulf States and Turkey all rushed to go nuclear.

Yes, that would be the same tactic of politicide that the Israeli's have used to such great effect in the Occupied Territories: make life so unbearable that anyone who can, leaves. That'd be the well-educated, the middle-classes who would lead social movements and other forms of viable resistance. A jail with three walls... The late Baruch Kimmerling even wrote a book about it... Sigh.

Would a military attack work- or would Iran be able to rebuild swiftly? Would Iranian retaliation lead to a broader military conflict across the Gulf region- the home of US military bases and much of the world's oil? Would Israel attack if Washington held back?

Well, that's the nub of the issue, isn't it? The Israelis have expended a lot of energy on having their very own nuclear deterrent. You can kind of see their point. Given what the UK and US have allowed to happen in the past, would you, in their shoes, with your back really really the wall, trust the Gentiles not to sell you out? Not if you were sane.
They have airborne nukes, submarine nukes, and land-based nukes. And guess what. Those nukes can reach Europe. That is enough to concentrate anyone's mind.

Let the brain take the strain?

2009-02-28T08:01:00.000-08:00

Robert Reich wrote this book a long time ago (early 90s) called "The Work of Nations"- [the title an allusion to Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations."]

One of the most remembered ideas Reich threw out was that the future would see the rise of "symbolic analysts"

"Reich divides American jobs into three broad categories for assessing their contribution to new the global economy. These are "symbolic- analytic" services, routine production services, and "in-person" services. The first of these is carried out by what Reich calls "symbolic analysts" engineers, attorneys, scientists, professors, executives, journalists, consultants and other "mind workers" who engage in processing information and symbols for a living. These individuals, which make up roughly twenty percent of the labor force, occupy a privileged position in that they can sell their services in the global economy. They are well-educated and will occupy an even more advantageous position in society in the future."

from a review by a guy called Scott London

So, combine that with info-overload and your middle-class types (heck, everyone; why needlessly drag class warfare into all this) lives in terror of losing the plot.

And where there is a (perceived) need, can a kindly multi-national be far behind?

No, obviously not. That was a rhetorical question.

So for the last few years we've been treated to Cap'n Picard and Julie Walters and ex-Mrs Tom Cruise telling us they keep their grey matter in tip-top shape by using various 'brain trainers.'

Hmm. Which? have done a study, and gues what, there's no evidence the things work. The editor sensibly says-

"If people enjoy using these games then they should continue to do so- that's really a no-brainer. But if people are under the illusion that these devices are scientifically proven to keep their minds in shape, they should think again."

Quite.

But of course, here comes the plaintive response from a games industry neuroscientist:

"Our study showed that after training for five weeks subjects didn't just improve at the trained tasks, but they also improved on tests of memory and attention that were not part of the training."

I know who I trust to do rigorous and reliable and valid research. Which? do you trust?

Newspapers and their Meaning(s)

2009-02-28T07:38:00.000-08:00

What does your reading of a particular newspaper say about you?

Reading ANY newspaper (and here I exclude the Commuter McNuggets of the Metro) says that you're part of a dying breed- young hip folks get what infotainment they need from tinterweb and tv. Like the 20th century dinosaurs they are, the newspapers' circulation is packing up, and they are stroking out with increasing regularity.

There's that old saw- hang on, let me Google it-

Jim Hacker: "Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers:
- The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country;
- The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country;
- The Times is read by people who actually do run the country;
- The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country;
- The Financial Times is read by people who own the country;
- The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country;
- And the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is."

Sir Humphrey: "Prime Minister, what about the people who read the Sun?"

Bernard Woolley: "Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big tits."

Well, I used to read the Indie, but in between 18 and 25 either it changed or I did or we both did, so I then spent a wasted decade reading the Grauniad. For too long.
Then I spent years forcing myself to read the Financial Times till I got the knack.
Now I know what they mean by "No FT, no comment."

Reasons to love the FT
- quality of the writing (Matthew Engel, Gideon Rachman, Lucy Kellaway, Gillian Tait, Joshua Chaffin, Tony Barber etc etc)
- more facts per square inch, especially ones the other papers don't/won't print.
- virtually free of celebrity shite. There's no filtering that needs doing as you turn the pages.
- unashamedly capitalist; there's none of the tedious hand-wringing of the liberal press.
- actually takes anarchist and communist artists, film-makers seriously, without the patronising undertone (or overtone) of the Farringdon fuckwits.

And, if I'm honest, buying the FT is a a way of thinking myself (and trying to display to others) that I am Serious. And Diligent.

And I love buying the Morning Star alongside the FT, and doing a compare and contrast.

Hegel apparently said that reading a paper was one of the rituals of Modern Man. Not for much longer, but I for one will be sad to see the end of the FT, if and when that day comes.

Fourth World Reviewed (issue 149)

2009-02-28T07:12:00.000-08:00

Latest "Fourth World Review" slaps onto the doormat. (Last issue reviewed here)

Highlights include;

a provocative list of actions for re-imagining society by Will Sutherland,

"It is such a shame we cannot use the brains that evolution has given us. We may not be fiddling while Rome burns but rather frantically shopping until the planet is destroyed. 'Me now and feck thefuture' is the scream of a culture that is barely out of nappies. It is ugly and pathetic and will be viciously removed by nature- a rather unpleasant prospect for our children."

"How Green became a Screen" by Keith Farnish

"Greenpeace, WWF, the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth and every other mainstream environmental organisation believe that you can "fix" the problems inherent inthe system, to make this planet a better place; that you can appeal to the goodness of politicians and industrialists to make them curb their destructive behaviour; that you can bring about a sustainable society by urging people to change their light bulbs, shower instead of bath, travel a bit less, offset their emissions and recycle."

True, but doesn't address the institutional reasons for this, making it not just an issue of ideology, but practicalities (maintaining the flow of direct debits, relations with ministers, the need for regular victories etc etc). And the Thatcherite call- "what's the alternative?" is, to me, unanswered, here at least.

Transition Today- Peter North sort of responds to critiques made by Trapese, except he sort of doesn't.

"Planning a New World Order" by Donald Henry is- for me- the highlight of the issue, showing the conflicts of interest involved in planning consultancies when they work for councils and retailers, and the toothlessness of the regulatory bodies.

John Papworth closes out, as he does in every 4NW I've read so far, with some pungent observations.

"The motive power of the global economic system seems to have collapsed, and the prints, both tablids and broadsheets, appear to share a common ground of utter incomprehension, manifest contradiction and a capacity for limitless self-delusion."

All in all, worth a read, worth subscribing, which you can by sending a cheque payable to Fourth World Transition

FWR, 96 Gayton House, Knapp Road, London E3 4BY

Open and Shut up case...

2009-02-28T03:44:00.000-08:00

After the Convention of Modern Liberty debacle, I stomped off to my "local Wetherspoon's" (I'm aware of the contradiction, but the only 'greasy spoon' cafe nearby is awful) for a veggie breakfast.

Bumped into a guy I know tangentially, and although the conversation started off amicably enough, it soon spiralled out of control. I bear at least 50% of the blame for that, and really should grow up. Sigh. I think the button that was pushed (and again, I bear the blame here- I should be in better control of my buttons) was the resigned assumption that numbers attending a campaigning group's meetings must necessarily shrink with time.

WTF? Since when was it acceptable to accept that campaigns will go up like a rocket and down like a stick? Why aren't we moving heaven and earth to figure out how to do things better? Why aren't we doing sensible soul-searching about the reasons newbies don't stick around, why other people never quite set foot through the door, why the 'core group' is core, and stays core? Why aren't we highlighting the dangers of burnout and cliquyness in core groups?
Are we doing all this activism tosh this for social reasons, or are we doing it because we genuinely want to achieve our goals?? Huh??

So it all came down to a tedious semantic battle on the meaning of "open". Open has many meeetings, but here it was put, bizarrely as a "contradiction" with 'fun'.

Sigh.

http://www.agileopen.net/on-open-space is a good place to start.

Or here, here, here or here. Or here. Or here dammit.

Campaign Against Enduring Counter-productive and Useless Meetings is obviously going to have to be re-vivified...

Weight of the World 7: Oh gooder griefer

2009-02-22T08:38:00.000-08:00

Absolutely static. 127.7kiloes

Exercising lots.

Obviously eating too much good food.

Obviously the wife's fault for being such a good cook.

Nothing to do with a total lack of impulse control or moral fibre on my part. Couldn't be.

Anarchy in the FT!

2009-02-22T08:25:00.000-08:00

Ok ok, the title is a little disingenuous.

But on the stepper at t'gym, I encountered in the space of 10 minutes (or 200 calories), two snippets of interest to armchair beardies (ABs) like me.

In the FT Magazine for Feb 14/15 Anna Brooke does an interview with a Parisian sewer cleaner called Jose Lahaye. He talks about the vicissitudes of the job, and closes out with “Being a sewer man may be dangerous and dirty, but you receive a lot of praise and respect from both the public and the government, and that makes it all worthwhile.”

Which is what the ABs have argued in response to the puerile “well, if there was anarchy, nobody would do the unpleasant jobs” line. As if people who do unpleasant jobs are only motivated by money, or the threat of a bullet.

Later on in the same issue, the brilliant Matthew Engel (his piece on banking in Liechtenstein was fab) visits Summerhill, the (in)famous school Where the Kids Make the Rules..

“It is an illusion that Summerhill has no rules: Neill made a firm distinction between allowing children their own freedom and allowing them to interfere with anyone else's There probably isn't a school in the country with a thicker rule book.... It'sa also an illusion that kids dislike rules. They actually love applying them. They just resent the imposition of them by adults.”

Engel is not starry-eyed of course.

“It would be nice to believe that the absence of pressure to achieve perversely instils a thirst for knowledge and learning, but I saw no evidence of that.... Neil said: 'I would rather Summerhill produced a happy street sweeper than a neurotic prime minister.' But doesn't happiness come from fulfilment? Wouldn't a street sweeper who might have been PM be really neurotic.”

I've long noted that the Life and Arts section of the weekend FT takes artists/writers/film-makers etc who are anarchists and communists seriously, and manages to mention their political beliefs and actions without the standard sneer/smear/patronising chuckle of the Guardian etc. It's (yet another) reason to read the FT, as if all the others weren't enough.

Viz 183

2009-02-16T23:12:00.000-08:00

One of my not-so-guilty pleasures forced its way through my letter box yesterday; viz, the latest issue of Viz (this link apparently takes you to a "less shit viz website")

I read most of it on the stepper at the gym, polishing off Roger Mellie at home.

Not a classic, but still has its laugh-out loud moments.
"The Bee Man of Big Ben" is a sort of surreal piss-take of the Dam Busters, exquisitely drawn. Huge talent spent on something, well, childish, but revelling rightly in that childishness. That's Viz all over...

No hilarious letters for once- usually a strong point.

A fun "Photo Romance" about rich people not enjoying the credit crunch.

More Godot-esqe bleakness with the Drunken Bakers (for some reason one of them self-medicating flour for facial cuts caused by landing in broken glass had me almost falling off the stepper. Also beautifully drawn).

A standardly fun Profanisaurus.
Cleverest is probably "Excalibird: A magnificient piece that a chap manages to pull successfully, against all the odds."

And the highlight? Well, I suppose the Critics, who go from writing about how the recession is(n't) causing great Art to be produced to stacking shelves at Sainsco themselves... And then...

Weight of the World 6: Oh good grief

2009-02-15T11:58:00.000-08:00

Good thing I am actually changing shape, or I'd be extremely fed up.

Am continuing to shift lard from belly etc, to the point where folks are commenting. Am I shifting it off the scales? Am I heck. 127.7, as of Friday 13th.

It's enough to make a man comfort eat...

Ashes to Ashes: Two bald men fighting over a comb

2009-02-08T04:05:00.000-08:00

Four years ago, Australia had just beaten India (in India) and came to England to wallop the Poms again. A little complacent, a little arrogant (what, Australians? never). They neglected to note that said Poms had just beaten South Africa, and were on a bit of a roll.
My mate Dave was going to be content with a few sessions going the Poms way, but we all know what happened-
A wolf-pack of Steve Harmison, Andrew Flintoff, Matthew Hoggard and the 'tasty' (wife's words) Simon Jones used reverse swing and a bit of thought to hamstring the Aussies. Gilchrist neutered, Martyn and Hayden and Langer not up for it. If it hadn't been for Warnie and Brett Lee, our batting totals would have been even worse.
It was a great series, and the better team won.
[The next series, in Australia, 2006-7 was less fun to watch, because the English preparations were non-existent, and as a captain, Flintoff is a great bowler (this too was predicted by Dave).]

And now, with the next Ashes four months away, the Aussies have lost their Old Guard and are in the inevitable shaky transition. Beaten by the South Africans, beaten by New Zealand. They have a lot to prove.
And the Poms? To lose by an innings when you were only 70 behind takes real talent. It reminds Dave of the pre-Hussain days "when England lost everything. Always."

Will the cricket be any good? Dunno. Will it be a spectacle? You bet.

Weight of the World 5: Ups and downs

2009-02-06T11:06:00.000-08:00

Spent last week on the stepper and then undoing it the following morning with a cooked breakfast.

Anyhow, got on the Scales of Justice on Monday and had gone all the way back up to 129.7. i.e had managed to lose 0.7 of a kilo in a month. Except, except... people were commenting on shape change and beer gut loss, and I too felt better.

So today, same scales, four days later, 127.4. Go figure.

Off to gym for two hour stepper stint, and another tomorrow.

Blind persistence is one of my talents, sometimes.

The Uncanny Valley

2009-01-31T12:36:00.000-08:00

This I think is interesting:

"Japanese roboticist Mashiro Mori, whose study of engineering is heavily influenced by the teachings of Buddhism, posits the theory of the Uncanny Valley. This theory explains how humans react to robots and other non-human beings. The Uncanny Valley theory states that social acceptance of a robot by humans increases as the robot becomes more human-like in quality. Emotional response is increasingly positive as the robot gains more human-like qualities like movement and appearance. However, at a point where an automaton is almost nearly human-like, acceptance of the robot suddenly drops off (MacDorman, 2005), and the emotional response is one of repulsion. This is the point at which a robot is nearly human. Plotted on a graph with reaction and acceptance on the X axis and human-like quality on the Y axis, this dip in the acceptance curve is the 'Uncanny Valley'- a point at which observers find viewing or interacting with the robot disquieting or disturbing (MacDorman, 2005). As the appearance, motion and behaviour of the robot continue to be more indistinguishable than those of a human, emotional response once again rises and approaches human-to-human empathy levels."

from "Robots and Nursing: Concepts, Relationships and Practice"

Aric Campling, Tetsuya Tanioka and Rozzano Locsin

in Technology and Nursing: Practice, Concepts and Issues eds Alan Barnard and Rozzano Locsin Palgrave 2007

Pots and Kettles: Everybody's talking at me.

2009-01-29T15:06:00.000-08:00

Pots and kettles.

It's been a day of being talked at.

I'm in the middle of an extremely interesting and useful course for my work. A lot of effort has gone into putting it together- the speakers are excellent, and I am seriously grateful to the organisers and also to my employer for giving me the time, and paying the costs.

And with that, you just know there is going to be a big but. There so often is with me.

And the but is this: We've had four days almost solid of the same format- 50 or 60 minutes of talking at, with a brief opportunity for questions. (We've also had a smattering of practical demonstrations, with other people giving up their time to make this possible; and again, I'm grateful to them.)

I just wish

a) we'd had some different formats- problem-solving and info-sharing sessions, where we could ask each other for experiences, share ideas and innovations, and also draw on the phenomenal experience of the lecturers.

[I suppose it's the whole open space/unconference thing...]

b) I had the social standing and guts to put this across to the organisers thereof, in a tactful enough manner that it didn't come across as a whine.

During the lunch break I walked past a group of protestors with their trestle table. They're doing good work, patently, on Gaza, but I do wish the 20ish year old student hadn't just spewed long lists of what they were doing/wanted to do, but instead had asked where I was coming from/what I thought. Not because I have any particular expertise/advice worth sharing, but because if he keeps at that, he's going to alienate a lot of people. And Gaza (and by extension Israel) needs all the friends it can get.

Things to (re)-read: that "Time to Listen" book

Pots and kettles.

More Davos hilarity

2009-01-29T15:01:00.001-08:00

I blogged briefly yesterday on Davos, and couldn't get a comedy meta-tag to work. Never mind. Here's some more Davos hilarity from the FT and Indie (which had the front page headline "It just gets worse and worse". On first glance, I thought they were being honest about their own paper. I thought 'hmm, bold, but a little self-indulgent' before realising they were talking about the global economy...

[I suppose a responsible blogger would share his Profound Thoughts about Erdogan v. Peres, but I'm not, I've not got, and I can't be arsed...]

Davos gadgets

This year's Davos gadget was a little blue pedometer. Each delegate was issued with one and invited to “walk the global village”.

“Be fit, get there quicker and count your steps on the way. Enjoy breathing healthy mountain air. Reduce traffic congestion and contribute to a 'Green Davos'. Be recognised as Walker of the Year 2009”

Anyone who walks more than 20,000 steps is entered in a prize draw. With packed snow on the pavements and waist height drifts on the roadside, there will be more broken bones than on the slopes.

FT 28 Jan 2009 page 18

In downbeat Davos, the happy capitalist is hard to find.

Jeremy Warner

Independent 29 Jan 2009 page 43

“In all the years I've been coming to these annual gatherings of the global business elite, I've never known the mood to be more downbeat, or confidence so deflated. Global capitalism was meant to have all the solutions.

This year, business leaders and bankers are left forlornly wondering what more governments can do to bail them out.”

Problems shaping post-crisis party's guest list

I am now in Davos and preparing to play my part in “shaping the post-crisis world”, which is the official title of this year's forum. I must say this strikes me as over-optimistic. The words “shaping” and “post-crisis” seem misplaced. (I will grudgingly accept “world”.)

But what would be a better title for this year's Davos? “Sinking in quicksand” is closer to the spirit of the times; “Buried under an avalanche of debt” acknowledges our Alpine surroundings; “Up shit creek without a paddle” has an appealing directness and shares more or less the same length and meter as “Shaping the post-crisis”- so that is my favourite for the moment. But I am open to suggestions.

Gideon Rachman

FT 29 Jan 2009

Nobody has a fucking clue, as per William Goldman.

Magic Mountains, Mad Scientists

2009-01-28T15:18:00.000-08:00

So, another January, another “World Economic Forum” in Davos, Switzerland.

[The World Social Forum, happening simultaneously, seems to have been disappeared.]

The FT has done what it usually does in these circumstances- sent a hefty delegation of reporters, got some guest bloggers etc. And for us time-poor proles, it has published a tabloid sized “Guide to Davos”, entitled “The Magic Mountain.” It's 16 pages. Four of those pages are full-page adverts for wind turbine maker Vestas. I think they hope to make some of the green stuff from green energy...

Anyway a letter in today's FT pointed out, merely name-checking the novel of the same name, written by Thomas Mann, is not really adequate.

Mann wrote a humungous novel (800 pages or so) about a bunch of sick people utterly divorced from the real world in their own self-indulgent bubble. Eventually, when the protagonist descends...

SPOILER ALERT

he is caught up in a violent global cataclysm and it is not at all sure he lives.

A few years ago American journalist Laurie Garrett was at Davos, and an email she sent to friends leaked, to amusement of most and annoyance of others. It was a minor internet sensation in 2003 (yes, you young folk, we had the internet all the way back in 2003. Steam-driven, with clacker-attacks, it's true, but tinterweb nonetheless):

"The world isn't run by a clever cabal. It's run by about 5,000 bickering, sometimes charming, usually arrogant, mostly male people who are accustomed to living in either phenomenal wealth, or great personal power. A few have both. Many of them turn out to be remarkably naive -- especially about science and technology. All of them are financially wise, though their ranks have thinned due to unwise tech-stock investing. They pay close heed to politics, though most would be happy if the global political system behaved far more rationally -- better for the bottom line. They work very hard, attending sessions from dawn to nearly midnight, but expect the standards of intelligence and analysis to be the best available in the entire world. They are impatient. They have a hard time reconciling long term issues (global warming, AIDS pandemic, resource scarcity) with their daily bottomline foci. They are comfortable working across languages, cultures and gender, though white caucasian males still outnumber all other categories. They adore hi-tech gadgets and are glued to their cell phones."

[emphasis added]

Compare with this, from the FT supplement's roundtable discussion.

Gideon Rachman: “...but what you saw all the time at Davos was a huge faith in technology. But I wonder whether that technological optimism is, along with the market optimism, going to be diminished.”

The discussion is worth a read- it covered the usual: Economic Crisis, Banking/Global Economy, China/emerging markets, the end of Davos?, Barack Obama and the US, Climate Change, predictions for 2009.

Apparently you can listen to the whole thing at www.ft.com/roundtable

And finally, no discussion about the entirely sane and rational and peace-loving lotus-eaters who attend Omnicorp summits like this is ever complete without a compare and contrast with Davros, genteel scientist...

Weight of the World 4: One stepper forwards?

2009-01-23T15:42:00.000-08:00

and two steps back...

128.7 bastard kilos.

That would be UP 0.8 of a kilo or whatever since last Friday

But, as I shall tell myself for the next few days, this is because muscle weighs more than fat blah blah blah and other blah blah self-deluding tosh.

Have been wellying it on the stepper, and it's true, my legs feel stronger and I can certainly go longer on the max setting. So, fitter, but pounds that I've gluttonously acquired over years won't be shed in weeks...

FaT heads: Facebook and Twitter

2009-01-22T13:14:00.000-08:00

Facebook and Twitter (“FaT”) are not just methods of communication and exchange. [Just as a car not just a box with wheels that converts dead pressed ferns into kinetic energy and carbon emissions.]

They are- like cars- vehicles of display; we display ourselves and seek affirmation and validation through these technologies.

In FaT you accumulate popularity points. “Friends” and “followers.” Friends are easier to come by- asking someone to follow you seems a bit more like wheedling and neediness. Maybe this will change if Twitter starts a “push” technology of suggesting followers of followers (the maths would perhaps be tricky, but there are smart people out there who'll try to monetize this).

And inevitably there are “bandwidth bandits”- namely those users who break the “untyped” rules of etiquette, and over-send. These are either de-friended or unfollowed (“fallowed”, perhaps?)

In both there is a semi-visible gardener tending the “weeds”. Facebook has a spam filter that over-reacts on occasion and threatens to bar users for sending similar messagers out. Twitter disables accounts that seem suspicious- weird names that are strings of letters probably generated by robots/spiders/whatever-Wired-is-calling-this-stuff-these-days.

Twitter, I think, will be more useful for finding out new things, and making links that could get you a new job, a new way of seeing the world or whatever. And this is perhaps an example of the famous “Strength of Weak Ties”- most of the people you know (Friends) are exposed to the same info as you, on the same wavelength or whatever. But your “followers” tend to be random people you never met. And they tend to have little snippets and titbits and jobleads and all the rest of it.

(I'd recommend Philip Ball's “Critical Mass” for more on weak ties and social networks etc)

Practicalities

Facebook has the edge at the moment for advertising events, certainly in Manchester. That's simply Metcalfe's law- there are gazillions of facebookers, but fewer than a thousand Manchester twitterers. This will change, of course.

The limits of twitter- the 140 character limit demands the ability to compress your thoughts, and to use tinyurls, which are functional but aesthetically dubious. Some people are unable/unwilling to compress, and will witter rather than twitter: They will either vote with their thumbs and not use it or else send tweets spread over multiple messages, which is Bad Form Old Chap...

Twitter is “newer” in popularity, and so has a geek/early adopter cache.

Other people's posts on Facebook v. Twitter

Twitter versus Facebook: Should you Choose One?

by Guest Poster on January 13, 2009

“The usefulness of Twitter is not readily as obvious to some people as Facebook; although it may be more addictive once you get the hang of Tweeting; you get more immediate responses and it seems to live somewhere between the worlds of email, instant messaging and blogging. Twitter encourages constant “linking out” to anywhere and, in that respect, is more analogous to a pure search engine; another way to find people and content all over the Net.

"Twitter has quickly built brand awareness and a loyal following, especially among the technically adept; bloggers, online marketers, evangelists, basically anyone with something to promote seem to find Twitter extremely valuable.”

The Misunderstood Uses of Twitter and Facebook: Are You a Friend, Follower or a Fool?

by Guest Poster on December 20, 2008

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m a Twitter addict. I use Twitter daily; however, my uses aren’t to update friends. My sole purpose for using Twitter is to find others within my niche. I use it as a listening tool. I get a real-time pulse of the Tech sector, politics and any news via Twitter.

Bottom Line:

Facebook’s main purpose centers on furthering and cultivating relationships with already established friends

Twitter’s main purpose centers on social networking (meeting people across the world with similar interests)”

Twitter versus Facebook

Good post from all the way back in July 2008!

UPDATE:

This from the fiends at readwriteweb
"Twitter May Have Found its Business Model"

Weight of the World 3: Still Early Days

2009-01-16T17:04:00.000-08:00

127.9 kilos this morning. So, down 2.5 kilos in total over two weeks, which isn't bad going, I suppose, even if that figure (ho ho) disguises the fact that most of the weight was lost in the first week. But we're dealing with such piddling amounts per week that you just have to plod on for MONTHS. So be it.

Feel a lot better, stronger. May have even put some muscle bulk on quads and hams and glutes. Have been laying off the upper body workouts for just such a reason.

Ta to Pete for being shocked and appalled at my post-stepper pizza plan. It dissuaded me, perhaps for good...

Hard to see when I am going to get some proper sessions in next week, unless first thing in morning (only 60 mins), since every night is sort of booked with meetings and stuff...

24 hours a-twitter

2009-01-15T15:26:00.000-08:00

First thanks to Tim Difford for patient coaxing above and
beyond the call of duty to get me close enough to Twitter
so that Chi-Chi Ekweozor could deliver the coup de grace
at the Social Media event last night.

I came home and got going, following TD's rule for
world domination.

And made a photo using, "Paint".

And didn't Read the Effing Manual.  So sent direct messages
out as updates, having already widgetted the
Manchester Climate Fortnightly blog.

So now everyone knows the names of my cats. Well, my
wife's cats technically.

What impressions?

140 characters imposes a pitch-perfect level of discipline.
Can anyone tell me whether this was accident or design?
Did the Twitter-meisters tool around with different lengths,
or was it serendipity, like SMS itself?

It's patently addictive.

It could easily be my number one time blackhole, the way
Scrabulous was six months ago.

It is going to have very interesting effects on how people
communicate with each other.


[Ed: that's enough banalities for now]

Sigmund Freud, the FT, and parapraxis

2009-01-15T14:38:00.000-08:00

Siggie Freud is known for a lot of things, which shan't detain us here.

[Funniest Freud thing I ever read was a play called “Le Visiteur” by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, set in 1938 Vienna. The Nazis are there, Anna's trying to get dad to London and someone turns up plausibly claiming to be God, wanting psychoanalysis because he's depressed about the coming 6 years... Check it out! But I digress]

Am just reading about him and the possible organic base for the “ego-defence mechanisms” in “Phantoms in the Brain”, a top notch popular science book by a journalist Sandra Blakeslee and an absurdly astute neuroscientist called V.S. Ramachandran. But I digress again.

One Freudian insight most people like is the “slips of the tongue” thing. It's technically known as parapraxis-

"A minor error, such as a slip of the tongue, thought to reveal a repressed motive."

Well, my favourite read, the FT, has lines worth reading between. And parapraxis.

In “California scheming”- an article on infotech/clean tech and the idea of a “smart grid” there is the following admission.

"While it prides itself on a brand of hypercapitalism defined by the self-reliance of its entrepreneurs and the almost constant state of creative destruction in which they work, the Valley has long been a big beneficiary of government largesse. From the defence build-up that helped to create the semiconductor industry to the birth of the internet (itself initially a project of the Pentagon), much of the research and early contracts for new technologies has been funded by the taxpayer."

This of course will come as No Surprise to anyone who knows the concept of Military Keynesianism. Noam Chomsky is extremely strong on this stuff. See here for a review of a good book about him, that has a quote about MK.

Enoch Powell, the FT and parapolitics

2009-01-15T14:33:00.000-08:00

Enoch Powell was a High Tory as well as a racist. There's his infamous and career-ending “Rivers of Blood" speech but there's also the sharp understanding that Great Britain had, really, lost World War Two to the Americans, with the British Empire subsumed within the Pax Americana. (Empires often take over other empires as semi-going concerns- the Brits had done it with the Portuguese. But I digress...)

Powell also said something along the lines that British Foreign Policy (now) consisted of doing what the Americans wanted, before being asked.

And we have this in today's (15 Jan 2008) FT.

“The defence secretary, John Hutton, is to attack the commitment of the UK's EU allies to the war in Afghanistan, saying Europe can no longer continue “freeloading” on the back of US military security.”

And since we all know Obama wants an extra 30,000 troops in Afghanistan, I think we can see what signal HMG is trying to send him...

If you really want the skinny on “the Special Relationship”, and the mechanics of how the Americans have ensured a biddable British elite, then you need to look at “parapolitics”. And one of the best places to start for that is Lobster Magazine, issue 56 of which is reviewed here.

Social Media and Manchester

2009-01-14T22:42:00.000-08:00

Went to an event (more on that word later) last night about "Social Media", at the Northern pub, just off Oldham St.

Six workshops over two sessions on all different aspects of "social media" (internet technologies that enable better communication and collaboration and hangin' out).

Very relaxed atmosphere, lots of mingling, lots of interesting people.

I went to a "Beginners" session, and learnt about the basics of twitter and 'tweeting' etc run by Chi-chi Ekweozor of www.realfresh.tv

Tim Difford, of onegreenerday, suggested I come (not that anyone needs an invite- it's very informal), and for this I'm grateful to him.

"Event"- implies centrally organised and a bit boring. "Meeting" implies one strict agenda and a bit boring. This was something in between or off to one side. It had obviously cost some people time and energy to put together, but they weren't trying to get a direct ego hit in terms of attention/adulation.

I will certainly go again, and forward on details of the next one to all and sundry. I am now also determined to have a "Social Media and Climate Change" workshop at the conference on 7th March...

Green Capitalism: Images and 'Hidden' Realities

2009-01-11T07:42:00.000-08:00

"Of course, the more familiar image of green capitalism is one of small grassroots enterprises offering local services, solar housing, organic food markets, etc. It is true—and promising—that as ecological awareness spreads, the space for such activities will grow. We should also acknowledge that the related exploration of alternative living arrangements may contribute in a positive way to the longer-term conversion that is required. More generally, it is certainly the case that any effective conservation measures (including steps toward renewable energy) that can be taken in the short run should be welcomed, whoever takes them. But it is important not to see in such steps any repudiation by capital of its ecologically and socially devastating core commitment to expansion, accumulation, and profit."

This is banal to some, obvious to others and deeply heretical to most everyone else- at least, to those in the Corridors of Power of "our" political, economic and media insititutions.

Anyhow, it comes from an excellent article called "Capitalist and Socialist Responses to the Ecological Crisis" in Monthly Review November 2008, by Victor Wallis, who also writes for CNS.

Oh, here's a bit more:

"As this whole current of opinion becomes stronger, advocates of green capitalism pick up on the popular call for renewable energy, but accompany it with a vision of undiminished proliferation of industrial products. In so doing, they overlook the complexity of the environmental crisis, which has to do not only with the burning of fossil fuels but with assaults on the earth’s resource-base as a whole, including for example the paving over of green space, the raw-material and energy costs of producing solar collectors and wind-turbines, the encroachment on natural habitats (not only by buildings and pavement but also by dams, wind-turbines, etc.), the toxins associated with high-tech commodities, and the increasingly critical problem of waste disposal—in short, the routine spinoffs from capital’s unqualified prioritization of economic growth.... While the need to cut greenhouse gases is recognized, the challenge is posed in narrowly technological terms. Attempts to resist consumerism are belittled, on the assumption that innovations, along with massive public investment, will solve any problem of scarcity (the vision is emphatically centered on the United States, with China invoked to signify that the drive to growth is unstoppable). The very existence of an environmental nexus is called into question, on the grounds that the category “environment” can only be conceived either as excluding humans or as being synonymous with “everything,” at either of which extremes it is seen to make no sense. The biological understanding of the environment as a matrix with interpenetrating parts is not entertained."

Weight of the World 2: Early days

2009-01-09T11:09:00.000-08:00

Jan 9th
There's always low hanging fruit, not that I get my five portions a day.

The first week has gone well- down from 130.4 to 128.6 kilos. Weighed on the same (zeroed and accurate) scales at same time of day in same clothes blah blah.

To what do I ascribe my fantastic weight loss? Starvation since Wednesday? Cutting out all pizza etc?

No, I ascribe it to having gone to the gym and done a minimum of an hour (sometimes closer to two) on the stepper literally every day.

That's unsustainable in the long term (but great for getting through copies of the Financial Times and Capitalism Nature Socialism, Monthly Review etc.)

Oh, and I hadn't been doing any upper-body, which I've just now done, so some of that loss may have been from atrophy of pecs and deltoids etc.

So, an uniequivocal success so far.

Western Buddhism and the menage-a-moi

2009-01-08T14:39:00.000-08:00

"The problem of the uncritical acceptance of acontextual enlightenment should not be underestimated. As Slavoj Zizek often points out, what he calls “Western Buddhism” can function as the highest form of adaptation to late capitalism, allowing members of the most privileged sectors of the global system of domination to go about their work on behalf of that system while minimizing their level of guilt and stress and assuring themselves of their deeply compassionate qualities and the absolute perfection of their underlying Buddha-Natures. We may add that many of them also take comfort in the likelihood of a spectacular rebirth in their next lives: the ultimate upward mobility. What such “Western Buddhism” misses, or course, is that Buddhism is not about complacency but rather about the awakened mind."

This is from page 26 of the latest edition of Capitalism Nature Socialism, in an article that was slow to start, but really got going towards the end. It's called “Nagarjuna and the Ecology of Emptiness," by John Clark.
Zizek I can sort of take or leave. I did like his concept of the vanishing mediator, however...

Aida Hurtado said all that needed to be said on this.

"It doesn't matter how good you are, as a person, if the institutions of the society provide privilege to you based on their group oppression of others. Individuals belonging to dominant groups can be infinitely good, because they are never required to be personally bad."

She's quoted by the very interesting anti-racist activist Time Wise (blog, website). Check out this on Hilary supporters who were saying they'd vote McCain/stay home- ouch!

See also
New Age Capitalism by Kimberley J. Lau
Ones who walk away from Omelas, a short story by Ursula Le Guin

Are We Human or did you exchange...?

2009-01-08T14:09:00.000-08:00

I've an old favourite song, that's definitely on my desert island discs.

It's “Wish You Were Here” by Pink, or Floyd (I'm not sure which one is Pink)

It's got a line I love

“Did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?”

There are various interpretations, but to me it means you've a choice of being the star in your own soap opera, or you can get on with being a small and unglamorous part of the Bigger Picture.

You have to make it up as you go along, you never know if your efforts will pay off (in fact, you can be sure that most of them will end in 'failure'. The Mirror Test is no fun...)

And it relates to the whole notion of what some call the “Star System”, where social movements are seen as springing from individual heroic leaders (Martin Luther King, Gandhi etc). And if those leaders aren't around, nothing can happen. And that is both completely untrue, and conveniently disempowering. And- as usual in my experience- there's a quote from an interview with Noam Chomsky that says it well.

"The bad dynamic, what you're pointing to, is the "star story. It's standard when a popular movement takes off for people to show up and say, OK, I'm your leader. A Eugene McCarthy type, say. Here's a big popular movement. Fine. I'm your leader. Give me power. If you can't give me power I'll go home and write poetry and talk about baseball. And if you can give me power then I become your leader and now you look up to me and you go home and put the power in my hand. That's a familiar dynamic, and Bakunin's Red bureaucracy, no matter what its politics are. It could be right wing, it could be left wing. But there's a better dynamic, which is that the popular movements continue and strengthen, and where there are people around who, for whatever reason or quirk or privilege or whatever it may be, can contribute to them by intellectual activity, they do a part of it. That's all. They're not stars. They're not leaders. They're just contributing in the way that they know how to contribute. That would be a better structure. But it can tend to degenerate into this other very quickly, especially in a culture which is reinforcing their worst tendencies by trying to create an imagery of leadership and stars and heroes and so on."

And there's a new favourite song, which may not stand the test of time, but for now I love it.

It's the Killers, asking pretty much the same question as Messrs Pink and Floyd- “Are we human, or are we dancer?”

The lyrics are here, and they stand a read and a think and a listen.

“up to the platform of surrender
I was brought but I was kind
and sometimes I get nervous
when I see an open door”

Which comes to the same fear- of our smallness, the inadequacy of both our talents and our discipline to the problems we face (Samuel Johnson wrote a wonderful essay- “What Have Ye Done?” on this subject... (Dec 22^nd 1759 in The Idler)

"will your system be alright
when you dream of home tonight
there is no message were receiving
let me know is your heart still beating"

And to close, with a (from memory) phrase on the front of the Mozambican school exercise books I used to use.

“Vamos estudar e fazer do nossa de nossa educaca um instrumento de libertacao do povo.”

Which translates as “Let's study and make of our education an instrument of the liberation of the people.”

Catastrophising; C3PO, Jock and Game Theory

2009-01-06T15:19:00.000-08:00

It only just occurred to me that C3P0 is basically a tin version of Jock from the TV show Dad's Army. And there's also Eeyore and Chicken Little and the whole "Sky is Falling" thing.

So, I don't know the whole psychology of learned pessimism and catastrophising, but here are some guesses.

It's prophylactic- if the worst happens you are (slightly) prepared, and if it doesn't then you are pleasantly surprised, having managed to lower your expectations.
It's pleasurable- as in "disasturbation".
Also, invoking “game theory”* you don't lose credibility. To predict the “worst” makes you look tough-minded, where optimism is regarded as woolly idealism and naivete.
It ties in with the whole Conspiracy-Apocalypse-Paranoia Complex that I wrote about yonks ago and should dig off the hard drive and post somewhere.

This is all true, but dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system is hegemonic, in the sense of it being something that changes the rules of the game. And were are too cognitively limited, as a species and often as individuals, to spot that. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted, I guess. If you were tolerably rich.

[* I've done no such thing of course, just used the term (too) loosely to give a patina of profundity. But once I get my head around GT properly, I'll blog on it. A lot of it is tosh, and I recently read some rather good chapters in Philip Ball's “Critical Mass” on the subject. But I digress...]

Book Review: Participative Web and UCC

2009-01-06T10:52:00.000-08:00

Participative Web and User-Created Content: Web 2.0, Wikis and Social Networking

By Graham Vickery and Sacha Wunsch-Vincent

OECD 2006

Boiled down to three sentences
User Created Content is having various impacts on the Web, the people who use it and their societies and economies. But reliable information is hard to come by and hot damn this field is moving so fast that these guys didn't talk about facebook and twitter, which were gleams in a venture capitalist's eye back when it was written.

“Coolest” quote (it's all relative)

It is worth stressing that the social impact of the Internet in general and the impact of UCC-related pass-times and communication on society and personal relations have not yet been researched in detail. The spectrum of predictions ranges from Internet communications leading to the “breakdown of personal relationships and social contact” to Internet communications “holding great promises for improving real life relationships and tasks”. Recent assessments point to people communicating more than ever but that their pattern of communication and interaction has changed (Statistics 121 Canada, 2006). There is also insufficient understanding of how media consumption generally affects brain processing, learning, attitudes, and behaviour, e.g. the impacts of virtual worlds on behaviour, or on learning/skills (see also OECD, 2005d for skills in the context of online games).
More research in these fields is warranted.

Page 97

Should it be read? If so, by whom?
Sort of, if you're a sad anorak who wants to be able to boast about reading OECD reports in the original bureaucratese.

Other things on this theme I have read/seen that I'd recommend
The FT has a good tech coverage, though they seem a little over-enamoured of Twitter.

Couple of articles I read recently

Is Google Making us Stupid?
Nicholas Carr, The Atlantic Monthly, July 2008

The Autum of the Multitaskers
Walter Kirn, The Atlantic Monthly, November 2007

Pretty entertaining "Web Crashes" Onion TV story...

See also another dwight towers posting, on "The Angel of History"

Which includes a plug for/link to Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil

Other things on this theme that I should get round to
Grown Up Digital by Don Tapscott- it's on my list of books for 2009!

Other things by this author that I should get round to
blah

When/where I first encountered this author
blah

When/where I bought this book
Library book, cited somewhere that I can't now remember

Angels of History, Morning and Harlem

2009-01-05T14:12:00.000-08:00

Walter Benjamin, patron saint of cultural studies, famously wrote;

"There is a picture by Paul Klee called Angelus Novus. In it, an angel is depicted who appears as if trying to distance himself from something that he stares at. His eyes and mouth gape wide, his wings are stressed to their limit.

The Angel of History must look this way; he has turned to face the past. Where we see a constant chain of events, he sees only a single catastrophe incessantly piling ruin upon ruin and hurling them at his feet.

He would probably like to stop, waken the dead, and correct the devastation - but a storm is blowing hard from Paradise, and it is so strong he can no longer fold his wings.

While the debris piles toward the heavens before his eyes, the storm drives him incessantly into the Future that he has turned his back upon.

What we call Progress is this storm."

Which sort of knocks Juice Newton's Angel of the Morning and U2's Angel of Harlem into a cocked hat, eh?

On "Progress", I'd recommend

The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology by Langdon Winner
Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway by Clifford Stoll
All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity by Marshall Berman
Anything on technoscience by Donna Haraway or Cynthia Cockburn

I mean to get around to
The Myth of Progress by Tom Wessels
A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright
False Dawn by John Gray
Vandana Shiva's latest stuff

John Berger and Ways of Seeing

2009-01-04T10:49:00.001-08:00

This morning I was having breakfast with my collaborator Marc Roberts, the insanely prolific cartoonist. It turns out that Cantankerous Frank has a grand-daughter (when we dreamed her up, she was a daughter, but there's been some generational slippage). She's named after one of the people I most respect- Judi Bari.

Anyway, we were discussing what Judi would look like, and how hard it would be for her to have a family resemblance to Frank, who is, well, fugly. Because then it would MEAN something. And Marc went into this very intricate riff about another of his characters, Wendy, and her back story. I am hoping he will blog about that (I asked him to).

Anyway, I mentioned to Marc a quote from John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" which I have now tracked down. I think it is a corker:

"Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated.

"To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman's self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room, or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually."

And Frederick Raphael, what has he done except provide the occasional morsel of amusement for the editors of Private Eye?

Nature article on ursine defecation patterns...

2009-01-04T10:28:00.000-08:00

The prestigious journal Nature will not be publishing this article in a forthcoming issue.

The persistence of ursine defecation patterns in arboreal and sylvan eco-systems: rhetorical artefact or empirically proven?

Marc Hudson, Matthew Bright & Cassidy Irving

ABSTRACT: The question of the specific nature and site of ursine mammalian excretory processes is one that has exercised the rhetorical skills of homo sapiens sarcasticus for a considerable period of time. Given the frequent reference to this conundrum in demotic speech, it is surprising that this topic of lively debate has not been examined systematically. Paleo-ontological excavation of coprolites would indicate persistence of this behavioural trait through geological epochs. However, no meta-analysis of available scientific studies had been conducted. The authors review the literature and conclude that further well-funded research into this vital issue- alongside the nature of theological orthodoxy in the Vatican's leadership- is required. We offer a short list of suitable recipients of any grants that would be forthcoming.

Dr Who and the Parallels of Doom...

2009-01-04T09:50:00.001-08:00

Over at MancunianGreen, Brian Candeland has posted some political satire/fan fiction that is well worth a look. I don't think the Doctor has "done" the Middle East since about 1964, so it's good to see him getting around, albeit in unhappy circumstances.

And on this topic (Doctor Who, not the horrors of the [escalation of] the attack on Gaza), wasn't the Christmas special a relief? After last year's dire Voyage of the Damned (tastelessly named after a 1939 incident involving Jewish refugees from Hitler, many of whom were not allowed into Britain or USA and were sent back to Germany, where about half them were murdered in places like Auschwitz and Sobibor) it was great to see it all come together.

Especially good; David Morrissey, the Doctor's compassion having figured out what was going on "do you really want me to tell you?", Dervla Kirwan as the scenery-chewing baddie, the companion Rosalita, the knowing touches ("You ask a lot of questions." "Well, I am your companion" and "People will be talking about this for years.") all capped off with a giant iron cyberman coming up out of the Thames. Yessssss!!

Pity they didn't go for something a bit different (Paterson Joseph or Colin Salmon), because we have gotten comfortable enough, at last, with a figure of Britishness like the Doctor being, gasp, "not white".

Anyway, I witter...

Peter Gowan, Viz 181, Exhausted Nature...

2009-01-04T05:57:00.001-08:00

Peter Gowan is

“Professor of International Relations at London Metropolitan University and course director of the MA in International Relations. He is a member of the editorial board of the New Left Review, on the advisory boards of other journals and is a member of the America Discussion Group at the Royal Institute of International Affairs.”

He's a startlingly smart guy, IMHO. His article "Neo-Liberal Theory and Practice for Eastern Europe"(New Left Review 1/213 Sept/Oct 1995) is brilliant on the political choices around how Eastern Europe was dealt with after the collapse of the Soviet empire.

His book The Global Gamble (1999) has heaps of useful things in it, on what he calls “the Dollar Wall Street regime”. One day I'll blog on suzereignty...

Often my NLR's get left in their plastic wrapper for a bit. However, when latest thudded onto the mat with an editorial by Gowan “Crisis in the Heartland”, it got put in the "urgent gym reading" pile. There's HEAPS of good stuff in it. Tasters-

"All modern economic systems, capitalist or not, need credit institutions to smooth exchanges and transactions; they need banks to produce credit money and clearance systems to smooth the payment of debts. These are vital public services, like a health service. They are also inherently unstable: the essence of a bank, after all, is that it does not hold enough funds to cover all the claims of its depositors at any one time. Ensuring the safety of the system requires that competition between banks should be suppressed. Furthermore, policy questions as to where credit should be channelled are issues of great economic, social and political moment. Thus public ownership of the credit and banking system is rational and, indeed, necessary, along with democratic control. A public-utility model along these lines can, in principle, operate within capitalism. Even now the bulk of the German banking system remains in public hands, through savings banks and Landesbanken. The Chinese financial system is overwhelmingly centred on a handful of huge, publicly owned banks and the Chinese government does indeed steer the credit strategies of these banks. It is possible to envisage such a public-utility model operating with privatized banks. The post-war Japanese banking system could be held to have had this character, with all its banks strictly subordinated to the Bank of Japan’s policy control via the ‘window-guidance system’. The post-war British commercial bank cartel could also be viewed as broadly operating within that framework, albeit raking off excessive profits from its customers."

and

"This crisis of the American and European set-ups will no doubt have two intellectual effects. Firstly, to raise the credibility of the Chinese model of a state-owned, bank-centred financial system. This is the serious alternative to the credit models of the Atlantic world. The maintenance of capital controls and a non-convertible currency—which China has—are essential for the security of this system. Secondly, as the crisis unfolds, broader discussion of the public-utility model seems likely to return to political life, re-opening a debate that has been silenced since 1991."

I think there IS doubt about its intellectual effects. I think there's no guarantee a proper debate will be had. But then again, in a debate on this topic with Gowan, I'd back him every time...

Viz is something which, if I had any guilt/shame I'd call a “guilty pleasure.” It was the cause of most of the early rifts between me and my now-wife (I've found new ways to annoy her, mostly to do with not doing my share of the housework...) I've subscribed for a long long time, back before you saved any money doing so. It's gotten better over the years, I think. More frequent, funnier. I don't buy these myths of the golden age, and narratives of decline.

True, it's uneven, but you usually get a bellylaugh or two. Occasionally three. This time mine came while I was on the stepper, which was a bit disconcerting for me and t'other punters. It was during a cartoon in which Director-General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, is trying to leave an apology on Andrew Sachs' answer machine, but keeps getting drowned out by farting elephants and “swearing” presenters etc. It's entirely formulaic, a little puerile and very very funny. I don't know if I was laughing with the cartoonist, at him, or at myself for laughing at it. And I didn't care.

Other good bits- “Ban this Filthy BBC filth”
Saint versus Saint- Santa Claus trying to get the ascetic Saint Augustine to accept consumerism
Tasha's mam- all your class prejudices at chavs/scallies etc rolled into one, magnified and reflected. God bless ratboy, eh.
Christmas with the Drunken Bakers- makes Samuel Beckett look like Benny Hill.
Raffles the Gentleman Thug with what looks to me to be some quite rude Italian bits
The incomparable Roger Mellie writing a misery memoir
John Fardell's “The Critics” getting another comeuppance when they rub a genie up the wrong way (oh yes they do)
Sid the Sexist with a horribly wrong-placed wet dream

A couple of Profanisaurus entries-
“to punt from the Cambridge end”
“shituation”- a bad situation
worm-burping

Brilliant stuff.

Finally, I just had time to start reading more about the Exhaustion of Nature, in Monthly Review.

New Left Review, Viz, Studs Terkel, Cystic Fibrosis

2009-01-03T16:21:00.000-08:00

There's a bunch of words you don't see often together. Anyhow, here's a fascinating rundown of my fascinating day (irony alert).

After a pretty sleepless night (I got to read most of the book about the participaive web), I saw on the bbc's tinterweb site that the Aussies are struggling against South Africa in the dead rubber in Sydney. I may not see that Matthew Haydn in next year's Ashes, but then again, I may. Made the missus her first cup of tea, did the washing up, walked to walmart/Asda with the plastic recycling to walmart, bought vaseline for chaffing prevention.(fat bastard). Used the automated till- one more weapon in thinning out the workforce, eh? On the stepper for 80 minutes

Read Peter Gowan's New Left Review essay on the financial crises. He and I both get the FT, but he 'gets it'. Then for something a little heavier I read Viz (of which more separately- it made me laugh out loud and actually cry a little, which is kind of embarrassing on the stepper at the gym). Then started in on a piece from November's Monthly Review on soil and nature and capital.

Came home collecting cans as I did in days of yore. The rumour goes that one can recycled is equivalent to three hours of a TV on standby. There's a lot of TV hours on standby between the gym and home...

Read my bible for the King James Version posting (here).

Went on the March, via the newsagent for an FT and then a vegetarian pizza. So managed to miss both the pre- and post-march speeches. What a shame.

Back here and typed up the Terkel quotes, did a review. Woohoo.

Then got stuck into finally cracking out a crude but (in)effective CAECUM site. I am semi-serious about a Campaign Against Enduring Counter-productive & Useless Meetings. We really are lousy at them.

Sigh.

Oh, then to work to treat a young lady with cystic fibrosis, a cruel cruel disease.

Right. Separate posts about Gowan and Viz to be done...

Book Review: Will the Circle be Unbroken by Studs Terkel

2009-01-03T11:21:00.000-08:00

Studs Terkel (2001)

Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death and Dying.

Boiled down to three sentences

Studs Terkel, pushing 90, lets a whole bunch of people talk about death, dying, heaven, hell. There's war stories, AIDS stories, cancer stories, inflected with a clear understanding of how race and class and gender and your sexuality can really get you into more trouble than you need to be in- life as a shit sandwich and all that...

Coolest quote (there's a LOT)

One night we broke into the budget office of Chicago. We stole the records, we reviewed the numbers, and guess what? We found two million dollars that was unused in the city's health budget. We ran to the alderman, Helen Shiller. She made a stirring, stirring speech on the floor of the Chicago city council, saying , “Mayor Daley, you cannot kid us, you cannot lie to us.” In an impassioned plea, she revealed the truth to the entire council that magical day: “How do you explain these figures? How is it that this money has been unspent? And why are you telling the health department and people with AIDS in Chicago there is no money for services like affordable housing, transportation to clinics, groceries. How dare you. This is unconscionable.' The mayor was flabbergasted because I'm sure he's thinking, How the hell did you get this information? The vote was unanimous, the bill was passed, and two million dollars that we discovered was indeed available went to the organisations that were involved with the day-to-day life of people living with AIDS.

Page 280-1

Should it be read? If so, by whom?

Everyone should read this, whether they've got a terminal disease or not.
And everyone does have a terminal disease. It might take them 70 years to die, but they got it.

Other things on this theme I have read/seen that I'd recommend

The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

Body Work, a brilliant short documentary

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

Other things on this theme that I should get round to

dunno. Suggestions welcome.

Other things by this author that I should get round to

Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970) ISBN 0394427742

Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974). ISBN 0394478845

Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times (1977) ISBN 0394411021

American Dreams: Lost and Found (1983)

The Good War (1984) ISBN 0394531035

When/where I first encountered this author

Peter Euben, in Classical Political Theory, mentioned Working. Terkel just snuffed it of course, in October 2008

When/where I bought this book

Just before Xmas, from that cool remainder bookshop at the foot of Waterloo Station.

Of Body Counts, Max Weber and Gaming the system

2009-01-03T10:25:00.001-08:00

I've just read a really great collection of interviews about death and dying. Here's a bit from one with a Vietnam veteran, very very fucked up 35 years or so after the event-

"Fear death? Hell, no. I've been through some of the worst crap in the world. Jesus, when you got something that people don't talk about... One of the things they were interested in over there was a body count. If you didn't have enough bodies, they'd go around,taking a machete, chopping off body parts, putting them in different bags so you have more bodies. Enemy bodies. Throw a couple arms in this one, a leg in this one."

From an interview with Victor Israel Marquez
Page 112 of
Studs Terkel's
Will the Circle be Unbroken? Reflections on Death and Dignity.

Now, I've read a few good books on Vietnam- Dispatches by Michael Herr, Nam by Mark Baker, Journal of Plague Year by John Parrish and A Rumour of War by Philip Caputo among them, but this was the first time I'd heard that level of gaming the system. In one of the ones above (Baker? Herr?) there's a story of a grunt who had a necklace of Vietnamese ears. He was ordered to sew them back on the bodies, and in an act of rebellion (Good Soldier Schweik) he did so, but backwards. But the Marquez quote- urgh.

The obvious historical parallel is with King Leopold and his bounty for hands of the people of the Congo. Heart of Darkness meets Iron Cage of Rationality.

And the best documentary I saw about the grunt's experience of the war was Winter Soldier. Best film? Full Metal Jacket, which is half Dispatches, half "The Short-Timers."

The body count is a classic "not everything that can be measured matters; not everything that matters can be measured" dilemma. Asides from the morality of killing millions of people of course.

An historical note- Alain Enthoven, an early exponent/proponent of the body count, ended up as the godfather of the NHS's 90s to naughties "market" reforms.

I ain't marchin' anymore.

2009-01-03T07:35:00.000-08:00

Radio

I had the privilege of listening to Emporer Lib Dem Nick Clegg on the radio this morning. He started out with the obligatory and Ritual Invocations of Israel's right to defend itself. (No talk of morality or proportionality or Palestinians' right to resist illegal occupation of course.)

What Clegg's position boiled down to was- in paraphrase- "look, this is counter-productive, not in Israel's long-term interest blah blah blah.” Like a “dove” during the Vietnam War.

At which point I was dying for an Israeli to turn around say “Gee, thanks for the unsolicited strategic advice Mr Clegg, but we think we know our own interests better than you do, so we're going to keep on bombing, if it's all the same to you.” And would have loved to have heard Nick's response to this. Within the logic of his critique, where would he have been able to go?

The March
A very good turn out on short notice, and the organisers will doubtless be cheered by this. I've only the vaguest guesstimate of how many were there- so the usual heuristic applies- halve the number the organisers boast of, multiply the police estimate by two, and voila, you have the range of likely numbers. Two thousand? Three thousand? Something like that. A lot of Asians, maybe 60% of the turnout? Ditto for gender? At worst 50/50.
[Update 4.1.09 Sure enough, the BBC says 2000 and the organisers say 5000...]

Walking along, I overheard one of the police calling in to central control to get a specific CCTV camera trained on a group of 8 lads who looked like, well, 8 lads. God bless the Panopticon, eh?

We trudged up from from All Saints park, down Oxford Rd, right onto Deansgate, right up whatsit road and so into Albert Square, where a giant Santa squatted incongruously in front of the Town Hall. And it was cold. As TS Eliot said, in a different context "A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a journey."

And then, inevitably, we had the speeches. God will we ever learn? No-one can hear what is being said (which is usually a good thing for the reputation of whoever is speaking), and all the lines of attention are at a distant Leadership. Never are we invited to get into sub-groups based on where we live, what work we do etc and to start thinking about how to sustain a campaign that would force our government into something sensible and humane.

OF COURSE this is not always possible, and won't always work, and marches can be a merely a demonstration of strength rather than a further recruiting ground/planning space. But as it stands at present, local organising is, as far as I see it, rarely going on. There are spasms of activity when the atrocity levels rise from merely terrible to actually apocalyptic. And these set- piece marches, which make the participants feel like they're Doing Something, however briefly.

The marchers get to feel they've Done Their Bit, the invited speakers get an ego-boost and their organisations get added 'exposure', which beholds them to the march organisers. The police get overtime payments I guess.

So everyone is happy, and nothing changes.

Analysis

I haven't read enough on this, so I reserve the right to be absolutely wrong.

A couple of weeks ago there were some articles in the FT about the Saudi plan of 2002 getting dusted off, and Bush/Rice sort of backing it, for “legacy”/PR reasons. And taking the Chomskyite/MAD Magazine line that the thing a military industrial complex fears is a real prospect of peace, then the attack on Gaza “makes sense,”

If you don't want a final peace deal (yet, or maybe ever), and you want to keep strangling your enemy for an ever better deal, and you have a lingering fear that the New Guy might not tolerate your excesses, then you strike out. This has nothing to do with Jewishness, Inuitness, AlphaCentaurianism, this is just how the powerful play the game with much weaker opponents.

Best book I ever read about Israel was that Arthur Neslen's "Occupied Minds" published by Pluto Press. It's extraordinary.

Apologies to the late Phil Ochs for (mis)appropriating his song for the title of this posting.

Adjective Adjective Noun

2009-01-02T13:47:00.000-08:00

Reading through some old Prospects, I stumbled across a wonderful review of Zack Synder's delirious film "300" by the critic Mark Cousins (this may be him. Er no, I'm leaving that link in cos the guy sounds interesting, but I think THIS is the Mark Cousins I mean.) He uses an entirely apt phrase for this film- "gay Rumsfeldian surrealism."

Which, after I wiped the tears of laughter and recognition from my eyes, set me to thinking of other adjective adjective noun forumlations.

There's "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys", Groundskeeper Willie's take on the French, beloved by the neo-cons during their moment in the sun.

There's Voltaire on the Holy Roman Empire - "This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire."

And my favourite of all is John Harris on Newsnight Review, describing U2's song Vertigo- and I think the whole How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb as ... wait for it...

wait for it....

"Pompous Rock Esperanto."

Genius. I wonder if he practiced that one in the mirror beforehand, a la Travis Bickle?

Weight of the World 1: Let the games begin

2009-01-02T13:31:00.000-08:00

OK, so new year's resolution blah blah get fit blah blah lose weight blah blah develop a little hamstrings length etc.

Jumped on the talking scales today and they said "One at a time please." Or they would have.

Currently I am 130.4kilos, or 287.4 pounds

Now, I'm 6'3 and a half, so BMI isn't necessarily entirely accurate (apparently above 5'10" it gets wonky), BUT that is akin to saying "I'm not obese, I'm just short for my weight." My fighting/running weight is 100kilos or so, which I haven't seen for about 5 years.

So, what is to be done? Er, stop stuffing my face so much and get on the stepper a lot more.

Weekly progress to be charted on this blog.

Book Review: Social and Political Thought of Noam Chomsky

2009-01-01T11:53:00.000-08:00

The Social and Political Thought of Noam Chomsky
By Alison Edgley
Published by Routledge, 2000
ISBN 0415205867, 9780415205863
205 pages

I should declare an interest as I open this review; I met the author of this book at a recent conference and got on very well with her. In fact, she gave me the copy that now sits, heavily annotated, on my bookshelf. So, take my praise of it with that in mind.

Edgley is arguing that although

“Chomsky's work has an intended atheoretical quality to it. He wants us to concentrate on the detail, gruesome though it is. He wants us to remain in touch with the experience of those in the picture and he wants us to feel the 'reality' of those experiences.” (page 5),

if you look hard enough there are social and political theories he uses as underpinnings.

She quotes him (twice) as saying 'Is there anything in the social sciences that even merits the term 'theory'?” That is, some explanatory system involving hidden structures with non-trivial principles that provide understanding of phenomena. If so I've missed it'.

In six chapters- entitled political theory, the 'good society, state capitalism, state theory, nationalism and politics and the media, she teases out his theoretical underpinnings, showing a good grasp of the literature in question and work of relevant theorists (it was nice to see Bob Jessop, an interesting theorist of nationalism, get explained sympathetically).

She gives various excellent glosses of both the changing emphases of his work-

Chomsky's early work focuses on the more obvious ways in which the state can exercise control through the military and through the judiciary. He has also always had an eye upon the way in which intellectuals are quick to accept such control as natural, thereby justifying the process. His later work advances on the analysis of control by exposing the more subtle aspects of state control,through, for example, the media.
Page 81

and concepts like Military Keynesianism.

This is the system whereby the state stimulates demand, in this case for military hardware. The need to stimulate demand arises because the economy has the tendency to spiral into recession as a result of investors withdrawing investment when the return is too low. Keynes argued that if the government stepped in and boosted demand, investors would be given the incentive to invest. Under the military form of Keynesianism, the government not only subsidises production costs but is also the consumer. Keynes' model, however, sought for governments to intervene in the arena of welfare, with housing, hospitals and social welfare generally. Keynes recognised that workers are not just workers, they are also consumers, and that demand from them, and thus consumption, would be boosted if they had a higher standard of living. Hence creating a health productive economy. However, as Chomsky points out, these forms of state expenditure, when taken too far, interfere with the class-based nature of society, by giving ordinary people security and expectations which undermine the privileges of the wealthy.
Page 114

Her treatment of one of Chomsky's key influences, Rudolph Rocker, is excellent.

Indeed, Rocker is deeply critical of the view subscribed to by the historical materialist version of history that connects the rise of the national state with necessary progress. As far as Rocker is concerned '[t]he rise of the nationalist states not only did not further economic evolution in any way whatever, but the endless wars of that epoch and the senseless interference of despotism in the life of industry created that condition of cultural barbarism in which many of the best achievements of industrial technique were wholly or partly lost and had to be rediscovered later on.' In a discussion of the development of European industry, Rocker talks of 'unbridled favouritism.. convert[ing] entire industrial lines into monopolies.
Page 87

Given this, Chomsky's repeated statements that technologies are selected not merely for their profitability but also for their effects on class composition (e.g. Numerical control machine tools) are even more interesting.

Edgley's writing is rarely weighted down with jargon, though as is inevitable with any PhD thesis that becomes a book, bits of it are heavy going, especially the extended Hayek/Nozick etc section in chapter 2. These bits might usefully be skimmed over.

The only other thing I'd say is that there are some damn fine bits of Chomsky's “World Orders, Old and New” that would have illuminated some of Edgley's points to great effect. But there is only so much background reading you can do, and Chomsky seems to write a book more frequently than a normal person can read one.

If you're interested in Chomsky, and you've read a few of his books and interviews, this is a very good place to start.

Also worth reading: Milan Rai's “Chomsky's Politics”, which I read when it came out, in the mid-1990s.

(The other, more recent, Chomsky books may well be worth a read, I don't know. I am not so much interested in Chomsky's biography or what he thinks about specific issues as in using his example and his methods to do work of my own.)

Recycled resolutions

2009-01-01T03:23:00.001-08:00

One of the few advantages to being a 'rabid environmentalist' - alongside the smugness and comfort of the anticipation of saying "I told you so" to fellow scavengers of out-of-date tinned food in 20 years time- is that you get to recycle resolutions.

And many of them, from the tail end of 2007, have hardly been used at all!

So, the usual stuff about a less chunky (ahem), fitter Dwight for this year, there's saving money for the Big Trip, reading (and co-blogging) the King James Bible, writing a lot, including the following-

The Bourne essay
The Facebook essay
The Mindlab piece
The "C words" piece

and The Book,

all this alongside reading the prescribed list.

And being a nicer person, natch.

The FT, the Guardian and Deep Throat

2008-12-28T23:40:00.000-08:00

In his obit of Mark Felt, FT 20^th December, Jurek Martin concludes with this:

“He escaped implication in Watergate for years but Mr Felt did encounter legal problems of his own. After leaving the agency which he joined in 1942, he was convicted in 1981 for unauthorised FBI break-ins at homes of alleged radicals in the 1970, but was pardoned by President Ronald Reagan. He then retired to California.”

The Guardian, that noble little bast...ion of liberal values, didn't see fit to tell its readers this, at least in the paper version I saw. There is something in the online version here.

It's something I've noticed- the FT actually is MORE willing to talk about state power, and to give extreme left artists etc a fair hearing, than the Guardian. Can I prove this? No, I haven't had the time or the patience to do a comparative analysis, a la Herman and Chomsky. Someday mabe...

Other comparison- I watched Silence of the Lambs at the cinema in Australia and on video in the US. In the latter, somebody had edited out this bit

Jack Crawford: I remember you from my seminar at UVA. You grilled me pretty hard, as I recall, on the bureau's civil rights record in the Hoover years. I gave you an A.
Clarice Starling: A-minus, Sir.

This sort of censorship is not uncommon. And the bigger picture is that movies “critical” of the US military get no co-operation from said military. The classic, but trivial, example is the “Gene Hackman goes mad” cold-war thriller Crimson Tide...

PS The break-ins that Jurek Martin mentions were part of a programme that went all the way up to murder...)

PPS See also Cril Payne's "Deep Cover", for an extraordinary account of an undercover agent virtually stranded by the uncertainty around the Hoover succession.

Do I like kids? Yes, but I couldn't eat a whole one...

2008-12-28T13:31:00.000-08:00

My niece is kind of angelic (as long as you get to hand her back when she's being grumpy. Now that she's in the terrible twos, that's a lot of the time).

Was at a Turkish restaurant in London- the wonderful Ev- a couple of weeks back, with the wife, the mother-in-law, the sister-in-law, the brother-in-law and the said niece.

What struck me, between courses of excellent food, was just how much energy and time the kid's parents (and us too, but we're hardly central) put into her. There's toys, there's books, loads of interaction (attention, love etc). They're coaching her into her pleases and thank yous etc. And that is of course as it should be but isn't for far far too many kids. (I could insert here various horror stories about 'parents' with huge TVs and DVDs while their children live in utter deprivation through a door in the same house). And this is all about the inculcation of a certain habitus.

And the Turkish waiter and waitresses were basically non-violently fighting as to who got to play with her and fuss her. And this of course lead to speculation on non-Anglo societies and their actual love of children (as opposed to mere protestations of love). Barbara Kingsolver has some good essays on this, in one of her books. Example I think from the Canary Islands, if memory serves.

Anyway, I'd love to close out with that great Far Side cartoon of an Alien Family dinner, with all the full grown aliens sitting at one table, their kids at another, with one popping up out of the food and the caption "Mom, Bobby Joe's playing in the turkey again." But copyright, kicked off blogspot blah blah. For what it's worth, it's on page 16 of the Far Side Gallery 3.

bait and switch, feet of clay...

2008-12-28T13:19:00.000-08:00

Here's a blog posting that never got beyond scribbles on a (now unearthed) bit of paper.

Back in August I did a workshop on "growth economics as a suicide machine" at a festival.

And although it was not bad, it was not good enough and rank hypocrisy.

Because it was supposed to focus on solutions, but it's easier to talk about problems.
Because it started interactive then got bogged down in the things "I" wanted to get across/off my chest.
Should have had the second half as small group work, instead of me boring on about a history of the world and useful concepts.

What I forget is that if I prepare really well, then I perform quite well. But I (yes, the number of Is is conscious) then forget this, ascribing my good performance to innate genius. And then I get lazy/complacent and turn in a mediocre performance. And am rarely honest enough to call myself on it. Or worse, I DO call myself on it, but them am not organised enough, disciplined enough, to do it how it should be done.

Human, all too human...

Fiction to read in 2009. Still no women...

2008-12-28T01:12:00.000-08:00

The Radetsky March by Joseph Roth

The Man without Qualities by Robert Musil

Trance by Christopher Sorrentino

Sidetracked by Henning Mankell

Decision before Dawn by George Howe

Non-fiction books to be read and reviewed in '09

2008-12-28T00:49:00.001-08:00

OK, here in no particular order are the non-fiction books I am definitely going to read and review in 2009. Crushingly white, and 28 out of 29 are by men. That's kind of appalling...

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
Electric Universe - How Electricity Switched on the Modern World, by David Bodanis
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
A Brief History of the Future by John Naughton
Out of Control by Kevin Kelley
The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond
The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism and Environment by Richard Lewontin
Hollywood Utopia by Pat Brereton
Will the Circle be Unbroken by Studs Terkel
Unpeople: Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses by Mark Curtis
The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn
Remembering Forgetting by Ciaran Riordan
Ant by Charlotte Sleigh
Tools for Thought by CH Waddington
The Ape and the Sushi Master by Frans de Waal
The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama
Black Swan by Nicholas Taleb
Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World by Don Tapscott
The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford
Developing Management Skills for Europe by Whetten and Cameron
Participative Web and User Created Content Web 2.0, Wikis and Social Networking OECD
Remnants of Auschwitz by Giorgio Agamben
The Salaried Masses by Siegfried Kracauer
13 Seconds by Philip Caputo
The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker
Phantoms in the Brain by VS Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee
Why? by Charles Tilly
The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security by Grant Hammond
Sex, Drink and Fast Cars by Stephen Bayley

Nobody knows anything (much)

2008-12-16T12:01:00.000-08:00

Way back when I was young, shortly after the invention of the printing press, a book appeared by Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride, Marathon Man, Misery etc). It was called "Adventures in the Screentrade" and it was very good. I think I got it in a remainder shop in Edinburgh. In either that one or another- "Which Lie Did I Tell?" - he came up with his famous rule about Hollywood "Nobody knows anything."

It's a good memento mori (or perhaps memento incompetenci?) and John Authers authors a similar piece on the back of the Financial Times fund management (FTfm) supplement for December 15th-"Annus horribilis for the star investors". Resisting manfully the temptation to say something like "yes, these star investors were annuses," I'll simply say that youcan only buck the mean for so long...

On the broader subject of incompetence (and especially incompetent people's inability to perceive evidence that proves their incompetence), check out the Dunning-Kruger effect...

Of course, such radical epistemological doubt can be overplayed. Pilots do fly planes, surgeons do perform operations etc etc. There's quite a good riff in a David Lodge book about it. One of the later ones... hold on... Thinks. I think (ho ho)

Humans as nonviable organism? Chomsky

2008-12-14T12:36:00.000-08:00

QUESTION: Right. Can I ask you about your position on the possibility of ecological constraints on the realisation of human needs? Do you think -- even if there were the political will to achieve it -- that it might be impossible, for ecological reasons, to provide the necessary conditions for continued human flourishing?

CHOMSKY: Humans may well be a nonviable organism.

QUESTION: Do you think they are?

CHOMSKY: It's very likely. From an evolutionary point of view, higher intelligence seems to be maladaptive rather than adaptive. Biologically successful organisms have a rigid character and are well adapted to a certain environmental niche. If higher intelligence helped adaptation you would expect it to have arisen over and over again. However, it didn't. It arose in a single, not particularly successful organism, Homo Sapiens. And while the human population exploded, human societies developed in a way that has caused enormous damage to the environment. The human race could destroy itself and much organic life as a result.

http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/199808--.htm

It's human nature- the FT and the Conservatives

2008-12-14T12:20:00.000-08:00

We live- so the advertising slogan tells us- in financial times. We also live, especially since credit started crunching, in very interesting times.

The FT correspondents and pundits have been puzzling out loud this last year or so about all their old certainties (market, efficiency, light touch regulation blah blah). And they run columns from various other centrist/right figures that make for interesting reading too.

Jesse Norman (who he?- more below) had a column headed "Human beings are not mere selfish agents" on Friday December 5.

We are daily conditioned to think of human beings as "economic agents": as purely self-interested, endlessly calculating costs adn benefits and highly sensitive to marginal gains and losses.
But a problem arises when this economic image feeds back into society and becomes our default picture of human motivation. We secretly know this picture is wrong; and our best economists know it is wrong too. We are aware that it cannot explain such things as volunteering or philanthropy. We fret about excessive materialism. We yearn endlessly for the things money famously cannot buy: love, friendship, joy. Yet without an alternative picture of what a human being is, we have nowhere else to turn.
We need a different vision and a richer conception of humanity in our public policy. Such a vision starts by recognizing the limits of humna nature. It emphasises the importance of independent institutions, competition and entrepreneurship as factors driving prosperity. It rejects the idea that humans are merely passive vehicles for utility, in favour of a far more dynamic conception of human capability.

Well, this wouldn't be out of place in the pages of Resurgence or some such rich hippy publication. I think Norman (who he? again) is on about bounded rationality.

But then, I've read Noam Chomsky riffing on the utter poverty of the neo-liberal vision of human motivation in similar (well, better) terms. Except a few minutes of googling can't find it me. But I did find the following, from either Robin Hahnel or Michael Albert, authors of ParEcon: Life After Capitalism-

The first answer [in response to "human nature is bad and nothing can change"] I like to give I first heard from Noam Chomsky. Imagine you are in an upstairs window looking out over a nearly empty street below. It is a scorching hot day. A child below is enjoying an ice cream cone. Up walks a man. He looks down, grabs the cone, and swats the child aside into the gutter. He walks on enjoying his new cone. What do you think, from the safety of your distance from the scene, about this man? Of course, you think this fellow is pathological. You certainly don’t identify with him and think, that’s me down there, I would do that too. Instead you would be horrified and you would likely even rush down to comfort the child. But why?
If humans are greedy, self-centered, violent animals wouldn’t we expect that all humans, confronted with the opportunity to take a delicious morsel at no cost to themselves, would do so? Why should it horrify us when we see someone do it? Why should we find it pathological? The answer is that we actually do not think that people are innately thugs. We only gravitate to that claim when it serves our purposes to rationalize some agenda we hold for other reasons entirely, such as when we ignore widespread injustice because to do otherwise would be uncomfortable, costly, and even risky.

Remember the Replicants "I've seen C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate"? What couldn't they do? They couldn't feel empathy...

And now the punchline, for those of you patient enough to still be reading-

Jesse Norman is the Conservative candidate for Hereford and South Herefordshire. His book Compassionate Economics is published this week by Policy Exchange.

Yep, the same Policy Exchange who advocated de-populating Liverpool, Sunderland and Bradford...

For another post- the fascinating article on the politics of the organic movement in the latest Lobster...

"But people die in Nursing Homes"

2008-12-14T11:40:00.000-08:00

My best mate, "Dr Dave" was down for a visit. Somewhere in the haze of curry, porter and Aliens (the movie that is), we got to talking about death and euthanasia and all that stuff. Inspired by the recent documentary of a guy with MND taking the sensible steps. Or sensible sips, I suppose.

Dave related a story of how he had recently done a home visit, and ended up diagnosing someone with dementia, and then having a conversation with this person's spouse.

Dave: Well, if it gets to the stage where you find it difficult to cope, um... there can be social services input, home care etc. It may become necessary- if it all gets too much- to put [patient] in a nursing home.

Spouse: But people die in Nursing Homes.

Dave: " " [speechless]

Now, patient and spouse both in their late 70s...

WTF?

Did they not see what had happened to their parents? Their aunts and uncles? Their friends, by this age, FFS? Don't they get how life ends?

Me, I blame the War. When I qualified as a health care professional, there were still a few around who'd fought in it. They were, on the whole (without sinking into all that Greatest Generation guff), phlegmatic and realistic. They'd seen friends die, and they knew how life ends, and that they'd had 60 years or so that others hadn't. But those lot are mostly gone, so the people doing the dying now grew up in the 40s and 50s, and the war was a bit of a game, but rarely life and death.

Oh, and I also blame the Death of God. For the Victorians, death was no taboo, sex was. With fewer of us believing in a hereafter, those taboos have switched.

Best book I ever read about this- "The Denial of Death" by Ernest Becker.

Enough cod-sociology for one day I think...

Go with the Flow

2008-12-10T23:36:00.000-08:00

I often think of states not just as having a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, but also as being obsessed with regulating/encouraging free flows (e.g mercantilism to neoliberalism) of capital.

Of course, they're less keen on the free flow of people. That- “border patrols”- will need a separate posting.

Traffic lights are a trivial example of this:

The modern electric traffic light is an American invention. As early as 1912 in Salt Lake City, Utah, policeman Lester Wire invented the first red-green electric traffic lights. On 5 August 1914, the American Traffic Signal Company installed a traffic signal system on the corner of East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio. It had two colors, red and green, and a buzzer, based on the design of James Hoge, to provide a warning for color changes. The design by James Hoge allowed police and fire stations to control the signals in case of emergency. The first four-way, three-color traffic light was created by police officer William Potts in Detroit, Michigan in 1920. In 1923, Garrett Morgan patented a traffic signal device. It was Morgan's experience while driving along the streets of Cleveland that led to his invention of a traffic signal device. Ashville, Ohio claims to be the location of the oldest working traffic light in the United States, used at an intersection of public roads until 1982 when it was moved to a local museum

And of course, we regulate our own flows (toilet training, emotional “repression” and the whole Norbert Elias thing. This, from the wikipedia page about him gives you a taste:

Elias' most important work is the two-volume The Civilizing Process (Über den Prozess der Zivilisation). Originally published in 1939, it was virtually ignored until its republication in 1969, when its first volume was also translated into English. The first volume traces the historical developments of the European habitus, or "second nature," the particular individual psychic structures molded by social attitudes. Elias traced how post-medieval European standards regarding violence, sexual behaviour, bodily functions, table manners and forms of speech were gradually transformed by increasing thresholds of shame and repugnance, working outward from a nucleus in court etiquette. The internalized "self-restraint" imposed by increasingly complex networks of social connections developed the "psychological" self-perceptions that Freud recognized as the "super-ego." The second volume of The Civilizing Process looks into the causes of these processes and finds them in the increasingly centralized Early Modern state and the increasingly differentiated and interconnected web of society.

And on the subject of flows, we have the in a good groove flow-

Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.

And then of course there's the (often) bad “going with the flow” (of other people/the norms) phrase. The quote below is from page 276 of an amazing book called “The Other Side of Time: A combat surgeon in World War 2”

In the course of an argument in the command post somebody said, "Oh, shit, let's be practical," and I looked over to see Manfred staring at the floor, shaking his head, muttering in German. When I listened, he was saying, "Oh, shit, practical again, here comes practical marching. I'll never be free from practical." I asked him about his little chant, and he told me his definitions of "practical." The word praktisch had been a two-syllable club he'd been beaten by fellow students and teachers and businessmen and clergy all through the nightmare years. "Stop being such a god-damned idealist" Be practical!"

"You know what practical is?

"Practical means I know right from wrong but I'm too fucking scared to do what's right so I commit crimes or permit crimes and I say I'm only being practical. Practical means coward.

"Practical frequently means stupid. Someone is too goddamn dumb to realize the consequences of what he's doing and he hides under practical.

"It also means corrupt: I know what I ought to do but I'm being paid to do something different so I call it practical.
"Practical is an umbrella for the everything lousy people do."

I handed Manfred a bottle of brandy. "A toast, Manfred. Here's to the destruction of the practical!"

"The cowardly, greedy, vicious, plausible practical!"

The ultimate flow though- the one that will render all the others moot- is the flow of carbon dioxide from its long term sequestration as coal, oil or gas, into the atmosphere...

So it goes..

Internet-related Attention Deficit Disorder, or “IRADD, WTF?, QED, OMG”

2008-12-08T22:36:00.000-08:00

For years I've been saying that I was glad I'd done one undergraduate degree/developed some writing and research skills before the internet came along. Looking at people skimming and blagging their way through degrees, I've thought "that technology you're using is making you lazy." Hell, I'm even old enough to have been forced to learn my 12 times tables, while other kids were playing around with their new-fangled pocket calculators.

Anyway, now I have even more anecdotal evidence to "back up" my gut instinct.

Three articles I've read recently (as part of my general way-leads-on-to-way google-binging) are worth quoting at length.

The first is a fascinating and sad account of "The History of Flight Simulators: Two Cambridge Inventions" by John M. Rolfe. I only got it via a Googlecache, and even that seems to be gone now.

Anyway, here's the relevant bit, from a report by Frederick Bartlett in December 1940:

"Signals in the periphery of his field of attention tend increasingly to be neglected. Thus he will fail to respond to a falling indication fo the petrol gauge by turnign on to the reserve supply. He becomes increasingly distractable. And, increasingly, feelings of bodily discomfort begin to obtrude upon his consciousness. If he becomes aware of his diminised accuracy of performance, he is apt to attribute this, not to his own shortcomings, but to imperfections that have developed in the apparatus."

Then Nicholas Carr asks "Is Google making us stupid?"

The whole thing is worth reading, as opposed to "skimming"

As in, he quotes a "recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London"

"It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense."

Personally I think Carr's gloss on Frederick Taylor is a bit crude, and historically inaccurate, but there's plenty of other good stuff here-

"The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction."

and

"As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

From that article on Atlantic Monthly, I was only a click (after stopping for a breakfast of pancakes) from this-

The Autumn of the Multi-taskers by Walter Kirn

Oh, the whole thing is good.

"But on to the next inevitable contraction that everybody knows is coming, believes should have come a couple of years ago, and suspects can be postponed only if we pay no attention to the matter and stay very, very busy. I mean the end of the decade we may call the Roaring Zeros—these years of overleveraged, overextended, technology-driven, and finally unsustainable investment of our limited human energies in the dream of infinite connectivity. The overdoses, freak-outs, and collapses that converged in the late ’60s to wipe out the gains of the wide-eyed optimists who set out to “Be Here Now” but ended up making posters that read “Speed Kills” are finally coming for the wired utopians who strove to “Be Everywhere at Once” but lost a measure of innocence, or should have, when their manic credo convinced us we could fight two wars at the same time."

and this

"The next generation, presumably, is the hardest-hit. They’re the ones way out there on the cutting edge of the multitasking revolution, texting and instant messaging each other while they download music to their iPod and update their Facebook page and complete a homework assignment and keep an eye on the episode of The Hills flickering on a nearby television. (A recent study from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 53 percent of students in grades seven through 12 report consuming some other form of media while watching television; 58 percent multitask while reading; 62 percent while using the computer; and 63 percent while listening to music. “I get bored if it’s not all going at once,” said a 17-year-old quoted in the study.) They’re the ones whose still-maturing brains are being shaped to process information rather than understand or even remember it."

Clifford Stoll made similar arguments in a book called "Silicon Snake Oil", which I rather liked at the time (1996 or so).

Of course, this whole- "growing up offline" was a trade-off - in the 70s and 80s I went around expecting the crispy end of the world any and every day. Now we've got the squishy, and slower, end of the world to worry about. So it goes.

Hmm, forms of procrastination

2008-08-31T01:34:00.000-07:00

A largely "wasted" day Saturday. Could have been doing useful things with my life, stretching myself, producing things that other people find useful.
Instead... read two so-so whodunnits/thrillers set in Australia, and then washed that down with Clive James essays from "the Meaning of Recognition".
Procrastination eh, yeck.

PS The two books were Claire McNab's "Death Understood", which was OK, but didn't really *go* anywhere, and Garry Disher's "PayDirt", for which Richard Stark, creator of the Parker novels, ought really to be officially credited...

Movies I'd like to see

2008-08-04T07:17:00.001-07:00

OK, a short list so far, but...

Paul Greengrass directing Matt Damon as "Macbeth"
I don't think (and can't be bothered to check imdb) that anyone's done a movie version of Macbeth since Roman Polanski. And I can't think of anyone to do brooding anguish with blood on his hands that Damon directed by PG. And if it stopped them spoiling the perfection of the Bourne trilogy (esp the last two- the first was rank) then all the better.

This is from a scrap of paper - I think written in the aftermath of seeing the dismal Cap'n Picard version of Macbeth in the West End late last year. Urggh...

Reading on the Stepper- ROTS the brain

2008-08-04T07:01:00.000-07:00

Ah, only a year and a week.
Been busy.

Now going to start posting stuff here occasional burblings.

Various blogs need starting, IMHO
- "Reading on the Stepper"- ROTS the brain. As part of attempt to capture a bit more of what I read
- Something on Manchester and Climate Change (as part of MCFly)
- Something on Chomsky at 80
-er, that'll do...

Like falling off a blog...

2007-07-29T09:53:00.000-07:00

"Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs."

Michael Gorman

Well, mine are. Not.
Satisfying my intellectual needs takes cats, "real climate" and... the Financial Times.